HOENBILLS. 407 



trustworthy witnesses in order to be believed. Dr. Livingstone in his ' Missionary 

 Travels in South Africa ' relates his experience as follows : " The first time I saw this 

 bird was at Kolobery, where I had gone to the forest for some timber. Standing by 

 a tree, a native looked behind me and exclaimed, ' There is the nest of a korwe.' I 

 sa\\- a slit only about half an inch wide and three or four inches long, in a slight hollow 

 of a tree. Thinking the word korwe denoted some small animal, I waited with interest 

 to see what he would extract. He broke the clay which surrounded the slit, put his 

 arm into the hole, and brought out a tockus, or red-beaked hornbill, which he killed. 

 He informed me that when the female enters her nest she submits to a real confine- 

 ment. The male plasters up the entrance, leaving only a narrow slit by which to feed 

 his mate, and which exactly suits the form of his beak." 



Lieutenant-Colonel S. R. Tickell gives the following extract of his notes written 

 down at the time and place of observation, which relates to the concave-casqued horn- 

 bill (J3uceros bicornis), the 'homrai' of the Nepalese, represented in the accompany- 

 ing cut : " On my way back to Moulmein from Moolegit (a celebrated peak in the 

 Tenasserim range), when halting at Kyik, I heard by the merest chance from the 

 Karen villagers that a large hornbill was sitting on its nest in a tree close to the vil- 

 lage, and that for several years past the same pair of birds had resorted to that spot 

 for breeding. I lost no time, accordingly, in going to the place next morning, and 

 was shown a hole high iip in the trunk of a moderately large straight tree, branchless 

 for about fifty feet from the ground, in which the female, I was told, lay concealed. 

 The hole was_ covered with a thick layer of mud, all but a small space, through which 

 she could thrust the end of her bill, and so receive food from the male. 



" One of the villagers at length ascended with great labor, by means of bamboo- 

 pegs driven into the trunk, and commenced digging out the clay from the hole. 

 While so employed, the female kept uttering her rattling sonorous cries, and the male 

 remained perched on a neighboring tree, sometimes flying to and fro and coming close 

 to us. Of him the natives appeared to entertain great dread, saying he was sure to 

 assault them ; and it was with some difficulty I prevented them from shooting him 

 before they continued their attack on the nest. When the hole was enlarged suffi- 

 ciently, the man who ascended thrust in his arm, but was so soundly bitten by the 

 female, whose cries had become perfectly desperate, that he quickly withdrew, nar- 

 rowly escaping a tumble from his frail footing. After wrapping his hand in some 

 folds of cloth, he succeeded with some trouble in extracting the bird, a miserable- 

 looking object enough, wasted and dirty. She was handed down and let loose on the 

 ground, where she hopped about, unable to fly, and menacing the bystanders with her 

 bill ; and at length ascended a small tree, where she remained, being too stiff to use 

 her wings and join her mate. At the bottom of the hole, nearly three feet from the 

 orifice, was a solitary egg, resting upon mud, fragments of bark, and feathers." 



Xot less interesting is the account of Mr. C. Home in regard to the same species 

 as his observation indicates that it is the female herself that undertakes the plastering. 

 The nest was placed in a hole in a sissoo-tree on his lawn, opposite the veranda, so that 

 he could watch every thing through a glass : " On the 29th of April the female went 

 into the hole, and did not again come out. From the time the female went in, the 

 male was most assiduous in feeding her, bringing generally the small peepul-fig. On 

 April 30th I observed the female working hard at closing the orifice with her own 

 ordure. This she must have brought up from the bottom of the hole ; and she plas- 

 tered it right and left with the flat sides of her beak, as with a trowel. I never saw 



