THE SHOE-BILL. 
Balcmiceps rex. 
Plate XLIY. 
This extraordinary bird which inhabits the morasses traversed by the upper branches of the White Kile in 
the interior of Africa is one of the most remarkable objects that have ever been received alive in the Society’s 
Gardens. It is of greater interest as having escaped the notice of Naturalists until the year 1849, when two 
preserved specimens of it were first brought to Europe by Mansfield Parkyns, Esq., the well-known Abyssinian 
Traveller. These birds were shortly afterwards (January 14th, 1850) brought under the notice of the 
Zoological Society at one of their scientific meetings by Mr. Gould, who proposed for the species the scientific 
name Balcmiceps rex. 
In the summer of 1860 Mr. John Petherick, H. B. M., Consul for the Sudan, brought to England a living 
pair of these birds. They were purchased by the Society, and one of them lived nearly a year in the Gardens. 
They were young birds, having been hatched and reared under hens of the domestic fowl in a village 
situated on the Upper White Nile, and were the sole survivors of six individuals of the same species shipped 
for England by Mr. Petherick, from Khartoum. 
The Balcmiceps, as Mr. Petherick informs us, although only found in or near water, is hut rarely seen on 
the banks of the Nile itself, and then only when the interior is dried up, during the short hot season of the 
summer. The locality where these birds are most abundant is the vicinity of Gaba Schambyl, a hunting 
station, about a hundred miles to the west of the main stream, where a large morass with occasionally dry 
spots, which is more or less supplied with water all the year round, abounds in reeds and thick bushes, and 
offers them a favourite retreat. 
“ These birds,” says Mr. Petherick, “ are here seen in clusters of from a pair to perhaps one hundred 
together, mostly in the water, and when disturbed will fly low over its surface and settle at no great distance, 
but if frightened and fired at, they rise in flocks high in the air, and, after hovering and wheeling around, will 
settle on the highest trees, and as long as their disturbers are near will not return to the water. Their 
roosting place at night is, to the best of my belief, on the ground. Their food is, principally, fishes and 
water-snakes, which they have been seen by my men to catch and devour. They will also feed on the 
intestines of dead animals, the carcases of which they easily rip open with the strong hook of the upper bill. 
The breeding time of the Balcmiceps is in the rainy season, during the months of July and August, and the 
situation chosen is in the reeds or high grass immediately on the water’s edge, or some small elevated dry spot 
entirely surrounded by water. The birds, before laying, scrape a hole in the earth, in which, without any 
lining of grass or feathers the female deposits her eggs.” 
Mr. Gould, the well-known ornithologist, who first described this bird, was of opinion that it was more 
nearly allied to the Pelicans than to any other known form. But few who have seen it alive and studied its 
actions and general appearance will doubt that it must be arranged near the Storks (Ciconia), and in 
particular near the Tufted Umbrette (Scopus umbretta )—an aberrant member of the same family. An elaborate 
article on the osteology of the Balcmiceps , founded on an examination of the skeletons of the birds that died 
in the Society’s Gardens, has been prepared by Mr. W. K. Parker, F.R.S., and is published in the Society’s 
“ Transactions.” 
