324 
SAVAGE SUDAN 
brambles, mistletoes, lianas, and matted prehensile 
climbers that often shut out the lights of heaven. 
And amidst all this riot of plant-life, abounded denizens 
equally perplexing. Something that might have been 
a scrap of a rainbow flashed by. I fired, and the 
victim was a bridled bee-eater —Merops frenatus; then 
a flutteration in the vast canopy overhead attracted 
attention. This time it was a trio of golden-winged 
bats that fell. Next a flute-like whistle lured, and 
a third shot produced an ebony-hued shrike whose 
crimson breast gleamed 
like a flame of fire. Lan- 
iorius erythrogaster is his 
title, and besides the flute¬ 
like note, he also chatters 
like a magpie. But such 
wealth of bird-life will not 
be described. Not since 
the epoch of the Ptolemies 
—or before it either — 
have those “home-coverts” 
of ours resounded to such 
a fusillade. Sometimes by night the bag would exceed 
twenty brace, including emerald-green parrots, babblers, 
barbets and barbatulas, serins, sunbirds, woodchat and 
shrikes of a dozen species, waxbills, py telias, colies, hoopoes 
and wood-hoopoes [Irrisor and Scoptelus ), fire-finches and 
whydahs with such exaggerated tailpieces that, when on 
wing, they resembled squirrels volplaning—for the rest I 
must refer to the “official catalogue.” 1 There may be 
sportsmen who will smile at such enthusiasm for “tomtit- 
Red-wattled Lapwings 
(Sarciophorus tectus ). 
1 A pearl-spotted owlet ( Glaucidium fterlatum) proved to be the first 
recorded from the Sudan : and we also obtained honey-guides ( Indicator), 
wryneck, and a fresh kind of swift ( Cypselus ltorus ), near Eneikliba. Red- 
wattled lapwings ( Sarciophorus tectus ), as sketched, abounded on the drier 
plains—vociferous as peewits at home. A nest of a woodpecker (Mesofticus 
goertan ) contained a single big fledgeling on December 22nd. 
