192 
EASTERN ETHIOPIA 
XV 
in a museum, or alive in a menagerie-paddoek, might 
imagine them easy to shoot. All wild animals are 
watchful, quick to take alarm, and antelopes especially 
can move from place to place with great rapidity. 
When feeding on grassy plains they are extremely 
dithcult to approach nearer than 200 or 250 
yards. Alert animals of this kind, surrounded 
as they are by predacious beasts and hunters, soon 
appreciate danger. Every event around them they 
appreciate with quickness : even the noises and 
movement of birds are to them warning sounds and 
notes of alarm. W^e realised this when hunting, for 
whilst carefully stalking antelopes and slowly creeping 
through the grass, taking advantage of any slight rise 
or hillock, a hare would get up and run away, making, 
every few yards, curious bounds or jumps, or a noisy 
bird, especially the black-winged plover, would fly and 
shriek; then every head in the herd is raised, and the 
animals would be off. Schillings, in reference to the 
harsh cries of black-winged plovers alarming game, 
calls them the police of the wilderness in feathered 
uniforms.” 
On one occasion, when carefully creeping into a 
thicket to get a careful and favourable shot at a herd 
of zebra, I heard a tremendous cackling and saw around 
me about fifty guinea-fowl, happing their wings and 
screaming with their tails up, like turkeys in a farm¬ 
yard. It amused me very much, but alarmed the 
zebras and they were soon out of sight over a ridge. 
The oxpecker, or ‘Tick-bird,” is useful to the rhinoceros 
and the buhalo. All the mammals aie infested with 
ticks, which crowd on the l)are spaces of their bodies. It 
is not uncommon to see ten or twenty of these birds on 
a rhinoceros, kudu, or buffalo, busily engaged in pick¬ 
ing parasites : on the approach of the hunter they 
quickly give a note of alarm. The oxpecker is closely 
allied to the starling, which performs the same useful 
purpose for cattle and sheep in the British Isles. 
