The White-faced Glossy Ibis 



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Taken on Laguna Blanca 



A DISTANT VIEW 



Photo by the Author 



THE NAME "water turkey" has been preempted by the Anhinga 

 {Anhinga anhinga), but there is no law to prevent our likening the rich 

 bronzes of this bird's plumage to that of our barnyard favorite, the tur- 

 key. The sportsman, deceived by the appearance of size and by the de- 

 curved beak, has called him Black Curlew, and has added him piously and 

 numerously to an already overweighted bag. But the bird is not black, 

 only rich bronzy and chestnut ; it is not a Curlew — not within a thousand 

 miles; it is not a game-bird, for it is decidedly un-kosher. The joke, then, 

 has been upon Californians, who alone of all flesh-eating mortals have ever 

 rated this long-billed, worm-eating, shag-on-stilts as "game." 



The Glossy Ibis should be regarded solely as a work of art, a decora- 

 tive motif in bronze, made animate by the Artist Supreme and loaned to us 

 for the ornamentation of wayside pools, low horizons, and interminable 

 swamps. The Egyptians felt this decorative appeal, and by way of heading 

 off the sacrileges of hunger, made a god of the bird and declared its flesh 

 taboo. Ibis religiosa received abundant honors at the hands of the Egyp- 

 tians; but art would have been the gainer if the task of immortalizing the 

 bird had fallen to the Japanese instead. Surely those masters of art could 

 have cast the birds in a bronze more enduring than their own! 



1926 



