THE PELICAN. 



To be told by travellers that the clumsy, waddling 

 Pelican is a bird that soars high and flies far 

 sounds like a jest. Those of us who have only 

 seen him, grave and dignified, in his enclosure at the 

 Zoo, rousing himself when feeding-time comes round, but 

 mostly moving about in a dull, heavy kind of way, cannot 

 well believe that he can ever be other than awkward. 



Yet we have only to ask bird-lovers who have journeyed 

 in the warm, spacious lands that are his home, to find that 

 the Pelican free and wild is veritably a different creature 

 — strong on the wing and active and shrewd in winning 

 his daily food. 



Listen to what Mr. H. A. Bryden, the African hunter 

 and traveller, says, and picture to yourselves what he has 

 seen : " There are few things in nature more beautiful or 

 more impressive than the sight of a big troop of Pelicans, 

 hundreds in number, soaring far up into the heavens in 

 long skeins, each great bird following the other in orderly 

 and most majestic fiights. 



" In the Ngami country, on the Botletli River, in the 

 far interior of South Africa, these displays were particu- 

 larly grand. Up into the clear pale green and primrose 

 sky of an African dawn, after their night on the river, 

 where they had occupied themselves busily in fishing, they 

 rose slowly . . . winding through the clear atmosphere far 

 up to an enormous height." 



When they had thus mounted up, the whole chain of 



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