Notes of Travel in South Western Africa
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Game birds of South Africa?The Kori bustard?Rufous-crested bustard? Rupell's bustard?Cape Knorhaan bustard?Cape guinea-fowls? Great travellers?The chasse?Swainson's Francolin?Double- banded sand-grouse?Variegated sand-grouse?Harlequin quail? Little quail?Painted snipe?Common snipe?Jack snipe and woodcock. MY business left me but little time for either study, amusement, or recreation, my duties were so multifarious. It is true I kept a clerk and storekeeper, but I always made a point of checking all my books and accounts personally, and as business often called me away for weeks, nay, months, to distant posts and parts, I was not unfrequently greatly in arrears. Thus I remember once returning home with several months' extra work accumulated on my hands; indeed, I had to work by nights to enable
...me to get through all. This was very harassing and fatiguing, the more so as for more than one-half of the year my labors were performed in a sweltering atmosphere. But whenever I could snatch a moment from my onerous duties it was to study the fauna of the country, which afforded me inexhaustible delight and amusement. In this chapter, however, I will only speak of the " game birds " found in the vicinity of Otjimbingue and elsewhere in Damaraland and the adjacent regions, feeling assured that some notice of them will prove THE KORI BUSTARD. 29 more or less interesting, both to the sportsman and the naturalist. I will commence with the bustards, of which there are at least ten species, some of them beautifully plu- maged, indigenous to Southern Africa, and of these, five are natives of Damara and Great Namaqua Lands, viz.: The Kori bustard (Eupodotis Kori, Burch), usually called the " wildepauw" or wild peacock, a name, however, very wrongly applied ; the rath...
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