GREEN-BACKED GALLINULE 169 
sits with rounded shoulders on some stump or dead 
herbage by the hour together. As its food seems 
to consist almost entirely of the inner and soft 
parts of the shoots of reeds and other water-plants 
amongst which it lives all its days, it does not 
have to make any special effort to obtain food, and 
conceivably it may be one of those birds which are 
on a slow downward grade towards extinction. 
There can be little doubt but that the matter of 
food-supply has led many birds to alter their 
methods of life. In some cases, finding an abund- 
ance of food ever ready to hand, the use of the 
wings was abandoned, and with the inevitable 
result that just as they ceased to fly so the wings 
ceased growing, till at last they became flightless 
birds and at the mercy of each and every enemy 
that might attack them. It may be that think- 
ing on these things has made the bird melancholy 
and depressed ; but nothing can save it but “ buck- 
ing up” and using its powers. Mr. Erskine Nicol 
told me how once, when out shooting, he saw one 
in a cornfield near a stack; he went towards it and 
the bird ran behind the stack ; when he followed, it 
would not leave the friendly shelter, but by simply 
running round and round always kept safe. Mr. 
Nicol at last got tired of this useless chase and 
22 
