CHAPTER XIV 
OSTRICH 
The ostrich in Sudan stands on the prohibited list— 
none may be shot; but as the British Museum required 
specimens of the Sudan species, a special faculty had been 
granted to our expedition—(through the Foreign Office 
and the Sirdar)—to obtain these examples . 1 
Never having so much as seen an ostrich in the Sudan 
during my first expedition thereto, I cherished no great 
hope of being able to fulfil either this mission or two 
others with which we were entrusted, namely, to bring 
home specimens of the reticulated giraffe and of the 
Secretary-bird. The latter, though known to occur in 
the Sudan, is so scarce that only once during three years 
did we see it; the reticulated giraffe I felt (and feel) 
certain exists nowhere on the Nile. 
The ostrich, however, we did secure — thanks ex¬ 
clusively to the wonderful aptitude for “collecting” 
1 Nowhere in the Sudan do ostriches exist in the abundance that char¬ 
acterises British East Africa ; still the bird is widely distributed in those 
regions which are congenial to its peculiar tastes. These comprise the arid 
dry-grass prairies of the remote interior which the ostrich shares with giraffe 
and desert-gazelle. Thus towards Nyeda—eighty or ninety miles eastward 
of the Nile at Melut—half a dozen parties of ostrich may be encountered in 
a single day’s march ; and the same applies to the dry plateau of central 
Bahr-el-Ghazal. Naturally in marshy or forest-regions (such as constitute 
so much of the riverain of Nile) the ostrich is less in evidence. 
The Sudan ostrich has been differentiated as a distinct species —Struthio 
molybdophanes —and that diagnosis may be correct. Yet in British East 
Africa, I have a vague recollection (being at the time unaware of any 
distinction) that we shot ostriches of both of the presumed types—at any 
rate, some of the ostriches there have blue necks, others pink. 
