STONE-CUHLEW. 
a 
the male are shown as they are seen in life ; being only soft and fleshy they disappear in a day or two 
after the death of the bird. This fact sadly puzzled many of the ornithological wiseacres some years back, 
and they hunted out the dried specimens in several museums to discover if the birds bad signs of these 
marks, as they had never heard before that the males exhibited this peculiarity. Possibly it is only very 
old birds that show it: the two adult males, however, that I closely examined while alive on the Downs 
had these knobs well developed on the base of their beaks, though, if I am not mistaken, all signs of 
them vanished in a couple of days from the specimen I shot. 
