130 A BUFFALO HUNT [ch. yi 
young fawns of the kongoni seemed to have little fear 
of a horseman, if he approached while they were lying 
motionless on the ground; but they would run from a 
man on foot. 
There were interesting birds, too. Close by the 
woods at the river’s edge we saw a big black ground 
hornbill walking about, on the lookout for its usual 
dinner of small snakes and lizards. Large flocks of the 
beautiful Kavirondo cranes stalked over the plains and 
cultivated fields, or flew by with mournful, musical 
clangour. But the most interesting birds we saw were 
the black whydah finches. The female is a dull- 
coloured, ordinary-looking bird, somewhat like a female 
bobolink. The male in his courtship dress is clad in a 
uniform dark glossy suit, and his tail-feathers are almost 
like some of those of a barnyard rooster, being over 
twice as long as the rest of the bird, with a downward 
curve at the tips. The females were generally found in 
flocks, in which there would often be a goodly number 
of males also, and when the flocks put on speed the 
males tended to drop behind. The flocks were feed¬ 
ing in Heatley’s grain-fields, and he was threatening 
vengeance upon them. I was sorry, for the male birds 
certainly have habits of peculiar interest. They were 
not shy, although if we approached too near them in 
their favourite haunts — the grassland adjoining the 
papyrus beds—they would fly off and perch on the 
tops of the papyrus stems. The long tail hampers the 
bird in its flight, and it is often held at rather an angle 
downward, giving the bird a peculiar and almost insect¬ 
like appearance. But the marked and extraordinary 
peculiarity was the custom the cocks had of dancing in 
artificially-made dancing-rings. For a mile and a half 
beyond our camp, down the course of the Kamiti, the 
