190 EGYPTIAN BIRDS 
doesn’t, you know, mean wilderness at all; the 
ordinary wilderness means a sandy, deserty sort 
of place, but this wilderness, we are told, means 
a wet sort of watery place. How nice it is 
to have these clear explanations from the best 
authorities of all those mysteries that darkened our 
early years! The Pelican lives entirely on fish, and 
is therefore never far from water. Considering its 
rather clumsy form it is fairly agile, and it has been 
noted that it can and does perch freely on boughs 
that bend and swing with its weight when at large, 
and that in captivity at the London Zoological 
Gardens one habitually used to perch on the thin 
corrugated wire fence that bisects their small 
enclosure, an almost acrobatic feat one would not 
have expected it capable of performing. 
In books the statement has been made and often 
repeated that the Pelican breeds in Egypt, and my 
visit to Lake Menzaleh was very much taken just 
to settle whether it and Flamingoes did or did 
not breed there. I found they did not, and I 
should think it is very unlikely that they ever did, 
as though the lake is large the fact that fishermen’s 
boats go all over it would hardly make it a safe 
place for these big birds ever to nest in. 
