Birds by the Wayside 369 



BIRDS BY THE WAYSIDE, 



IN EGYPT AND NUBIA. 



BY ALTHEA R. SHERMAN. 



The traveler of today in Eg7pt is but one of its tens of 

 thousands of annual visitors, who form a procession that can 

 be traced back to Herodotus in the dim light of twenty-three 

 hundred years ago. Full many of this visiting- host have fur- 

 nished to the world most accurate descriptions and pictorial 

 representations, whereby the minds of all may be well-stored 

 with mental conceptions of what they are to see in a land slow 

 to underg'o chang-es. Probably in recent years the changes 

 are coming more rapidly, where the waters of the Nile have 

 been held back, where archzeologists are uncovering treasures 

 long hidden in the sands, and where some forms of life are 

 apparently vanishing. Such disappearance seems to me to 

 be the case of the Buffed-backed Heron (Ardcola russata). 

 Expecting to see the species in large numbers : flocks of them 

 following the plow or industriously picking flies from the 

 cattle in the fields, I saw barely three individuals on three 

 widely separated sand-bars in the Nile, notwithstanding that 

 for them a keen lookout was kept daily. Charles Whymper 

 in his " Egyptian Birds." published in 1909, writes that this 

 Heron is decreasing in numbers, having found it abundant in 

 the Delta twenty-five years before. A similar diminution 

 may be strongly suspected in several other species. 



Certain forms of life, that were associated for ages with 

 the Egyptian and Nubian Nile, are no longer seen there: 

 such were the lotus, the papyrus, and the bulrush. From an- 

 cient records we learn that formerly the hippopotamus and 

 the crocodile came down the river as far as Memphis. Sixty 

 years ago occasionallv a live crocodile might have been found 

 as fai' north as Kom Ombos, and forty years ago some still 

 lingered about the Second Cataract. But the naturalist or 

 sportsman of the present day bent on seeing the crocodile in 

 its native haunts must seek it to the south of Khartoum. 

 Copyrisjlit by Altliea R. Slierman. 1915. 



