a? a a no 
Le pre 
NATURAL HISTORY. | 251° 
and many of them came floating down the river, and were - 
washed ashore dying or dead. There was no cause easily 
ascertainable, and this mortality among them reminded me 
of a similar thing that occurs on the South-West African 
coast with the gannet (Sula capensis), sometimes called the 
whale-bird, which is often washed ashore dead in incredible 
quantities. In the Bay of Loanda I have counted often 
twenty dead gannets round the ship at a glance, and many 
of them are thrown up on to the beach both at Mossamedes 
and at Banana, the mouth of the Congo. After an 
epidemic like this, the sand is strewn with the carcases of 
these apparently uninjured birds, which in a few hours 
are almost consumed by the land crabs and the scapulated 
crows. 
Stanley Pool is a great place for aquatic birds. On the 
many islands that stud this beautiful expanse of the 
Congo you may see numbers of crowned cranes, marabou, 
saddle-billed, and common storks, Scopus wmbretta, sacred 
ibises, giant herons, egrets, bitterns, darters, cormorants, 
spur-winged and Egyptian geese, pratincoles, and large 
terns with scarlet beaks. Mr. Stanley maintains that he 
has met with Baleniceps rex, the whale-headed stork, on 
the upper Congo,* and, as he describes the bird very 
accurately, [ see no reason to doubt that he is correct in 
his assertion. In this case it would certainly extend the 
habitat of this curious Ardeine bird, hitherto supposed to 
solely inhabit the waters of the Upper Nile. 
A curious feature in Congo ornithology is the absence 
of all the vultures common to other parts of Africa, — Per- 
haps this may be accounted for by the comparative 
scarcity of big game, and yet, for all that, there is plenty 
of animal refuse along the river-side to keep going more 
than the one species of vulture—if vulture he be—that 
the Congo possesses. This latter bird is known scienti- 
fically as Gypohierax, and is sometimes called the Angola 
vulture, although he is found equally and quite as abun- 
dantly in Senegambia or anywhere in West Africa between 
* Vol. ii., p. 293, ‘Dark Continent.’ 
