THE ZooLocist—NoveMBER, 1876. _ 5139 
a patch of lentils twenty feet square, I may safely say, fifty brace 
rise.” The birds at this time are fat and delicious. 
A very characteristic bird of IXgypt is the spur-winged plover, 
called, from their cry, “ ziczacs” :— 
“They quite pervade Egypt. At the village pool, on every sandbank, in 
every flooded rice-field—go at any season you like, you cannot fail to find 
them. Similarly in the young wheat-crops and in the clover-fields they are 
quite at home. Sometimes, when I have been scanning a clover-field, my 
eye has been arrested by a white patch about the size of a florin, looking 
for all the world like an oxeye daisy; but though a second glance serves to 
show that it is not a flower, it will remain still for several seconds, and you 
may imagine that you see resentment gleaming out of a red eye. During 
this time the bird’s head is straight towards you,—as I have observed a 
bird’s in a bush generally is,—and he is working himself into a passion. 
His next performance, when he cannot stand being stared out of countenance 
any longer, is to jerk his body as if some one was pulling at him with a 
string, to dart up into the air, menacing you with his armed wings, and to 
give utterance to the loud bi-syllabic cry, which has obtained for him his 
name of Ziczac.” 
Mr. Gurney felt himself fully repaid for his journey to Egypt by 
the sight of the beautiful avocet, which used to be not uncommon 
in our fens, and by the grand spectacle presented by a flock of 
flamingos rising on wing. He says the description of the splendour 
of the latter has not been overrated :— 
“Nothing will ever dispel from my memory the feelings with which 
I first saw flamingos. It needs not the halo of Afric’s sun to illumine a 
splendour to which the gilded birds of the tropics must yield the palm. 
Marshalled, they stand in one long glittering line ; some of them apparently 
with no head; others with but one leg; others with raised wing and 
extended neck, evidently enjoying what is denominated stretch. Their tall 
forms are mirrored in the glassy lake. They are silent and still. Perchance 
a distant boatman hails us. Perchance the word backshish is borne on the 
air with such bawling that the cautious flamingos, fearful even in their 
security, are put up. Then what a delicious scene arrests the eye, as the 
black-pointed wings unfold, and reveal the intense red scapularies which, 
hidden before, appeared to be cream-colour, pale by comparison with their 
brightness now. They take several steps in the air, half flying, half walking, 
and wholly awkward, for twenty yards or more; and then, gathering 
themselves together, they gradually let their long legs trail out behind. 
If a small troop, they perhaps fly away in Indian file; but if a large one, 
they go off in one bright mass, the vivid tints of which are visible afar off, 
