THE CORMORANT 195 
get clean. The lake is nowhere very deep, but 
is absolutely full of fish ; you constantly see them 
jumping out of the water for a breath of fresh air, 
and I don’t blame them. The pools have crowds 
of small fry, and the larve of thousands of insects ; 
indeed, it is ‘a heaven for mosquitoes and a damp 
hell for men.” It is this extraordinary profusion 
of life bred in the water that causes it to be such a 
fine feeding-ground for the birds, but everything 
that comes out of that lake is slimy and smelling. 
In April, when I was at Menzaleh, the birds had 
not begun nesting, but there was every sign of 
quite a big Cormorant colony. I counted the sites 
of more than twenty nests on one island alone, and 
I saw Cormorants off and on nearly every day of 
my two weeks’ stay. 
Needless to say, the Cormorant is entirely a 
fish-feeding bird, and usually lives on or near 
the sea. The fact that a colony has been for so 
long now established up the river is certainly in- 
teresting, and it will be curious to see if these 
new great water-works do cause any further 
extension of their area. Mr. Erskine Nicol told 
me he saw two Cormorants flying down the river 
in February of this year (1909), at Luxor—one was 
an adult bird showing a very white head,—and 
