192



Captain Stanley S. Flower,



The bird being now known to the scientific world, and

wanted for museums, rewards were offered to the elephant hunters

of the White Nile to obtain specimens : but apparently no more

reached Khartoum till, in 1854, the French traders, de Malzac

and Vaissiere, who had been accompanied on the White Nile by

an experienced native collector of von Heuglin’s, brought in five

skins, and about the same time the party of the traveller

Barthelemy obtained two more.


Two live Shoebills were purchased by the Zoological

Society of London in April i860 (P.Z.S. 1S60, p. 243) from Mr.

John Petlierick, trader and British Consul at Khartoum, who had

obtained them in the Sudan, having hatched them from eggs

“ procured from the Raik negroes... .at a considerable distance

from Gaba Shambyl ” ; these two were the survivors “ out of six

Balaeniceps shipped at Khartoum, but perhaps out of a score

partially reared” (see P.Z.S. i860, pp. 195-199). These were the

first specimens of this most extraordinary bird ever brought

alive out of the Sudan and, as far as is known, no others have

been since, except the three individuals now living in the Giza

Zoological Gardens, which I brought down the Nile in 1902,

forty two years later than Petherick brought his and under much

easier circumstances.


Between 1854 and 1884 a certain number of skins of the

Shoebill were taken to Europe, but even now, in 1908, this bird

is one of the desiderata of many large museums.


The Mahdist insurrection closed the Sudan to scientific

research for many years, but after the final defeat of the dervishes

at Om Debrikat, 24th of November, 1899, Lord Cromer, who took

great interest in the zoology of the Sudan, suggested that in¬

formation should be collected about this little-known and in¬

teresting bird’, and if possible a skin obtained.


On the morning of the 30th of March, 1900, while the Gun¬

boat “ Abu Klea ” was exploring Lake Ambadi in the Bahr-el-

Ghazal, Mr. Cecil Crawley, with a .303 rifle, shot a Shoebill, which

I made a skin of: the work occupied nearly the whole day in a

damp heat of 97 0 Fahrenheit; this, presumably the first Shoebill

obtained by the present generation, was naturally an object of

great interest to all on board. The following afternoon a fire



