traced to Cape Colony, and to Ceylon. There is great
difference in the dimensions of individual birds, as well as
in the degrees of the rosy tints with which their plumage is
suffused; and to these circumstances are, perhaps, attributable
the separation of the allied forms Ph. erythraus,
Ph. minor, and Ph. rubidus. In North America the representative
species is the very distinct Ph. ruber; in
South America it is Ph. ignipalliatus; and on the lofty
plateaux of the Andes is found the remarkable Ph. andinus,
in which the hind toe is absent, for which reason the species
has been placed by Bonaparte in a different genus. Fossil
remains of a Flamingo have been found in the Lower Middle
Tertiary formations in France; and several extinct genera
from the lacustrine deposits of the Miocene period have been
referred to this family.
The earliest account of the nest of the Flamingo appears
to be that which is given by Dampier in his ‘ Voyages/
Vol. I. pp. 70, 71. On his visit to Sal, one of the smaller
of the Cape Verd Islands, in September 1688, he saw the
old nests in the form of hillocks, and the young hatched
that year, as wrell as the adults, and so far his descriptions
of them are tolerably accurate. He goes on to say that the
biids, when incubating, stand with their legs in the water,
lesting themselves against the Hillock, and covering the
hollow Nest upon it with their Rumps; for their Legs are very
long; and building thus as they do upon the Ground they
could neither draw their Legs conveniently into their Nests,
nor sit down upon them otherwise than by resting their whole
Bodies there, to the Prejudice of their Eggs or their Young,
were it not for this admirable Contrivance which they have
by natuial Instinct. In this he is obviously speaking
upon hearsay evidence, probably derived from the Governor
and the five or six men who were the only inhabitants of
that island, for in Seqitember no birds would have been
sitting on their eggs, and Dampier expressly says that he
never saw the nests or young of the Flamingo in any other
part of the world. His statement has, however, been
generally, if not universally, accepted, for want of a better,
inasmuch as no competent observer had succeeded until the
year 1883, in watching the manner in which the Flamingo
performed the task of incubation. Eggs have indeed been
obtained by the bushel, but the wariness of the birds precluded
any trustworthy account, until the visit of Mr. Abel
Chapman to a large colony near the mouth of the Guadalquivir.
The following is extracted from his narrative published
in ‘The Ibis’ for 1884 (pp. 86-89), with which an
illustration of the sitting bird is given from sketches made
on the spot:—
“ The islands were about six miles distant from the low
shores of the ‘ marisma,’ and at that distance no land whatever
was in sight. The only relief from the monotony of
endless wastes of water were the birds ; a shrieking, clamouring
crowd hung overhead, while only a few yards off the
surface was dotted with troops of Stilts, sedately stalking
about, knee-deep. Beyond these the strange forms of hundreds
of Flamingoes met one’s eye in every direction :
some in groups or in dense masses, others with rigidly
outstretched neck and legs, flying in short strings or larger
flights ‘ glinting ’ in the sunlight like a pink cloud. Many
pairs of old red birds were observed to be accompanied by a
single white (immature) one. On examining narrowly the
different herds, there was an obvious dissimilarity in the
appearance of certain groups: one or two in particular
seemed so much denser than the others; the narrow white
line appeared at least three times as thick, and in the centre
it looked as if the birds were literally piled upon each other.
Felipe suggested that these birds must be at their ‘ pajarera,’
or breeding-place; and after a long ride through rather deep
water we found that this was so. On our approach, the
cause of the peculiar appearance of the herd from a distance
became clearly discernible. Many of the birds were sitting
down on a low mud island ; some were standing on it, and
others, again, were in the water. Thus the different elevations
of their bodies formed what had appeared a triple or
quadruple line.
“ On reaching the spot, we found a perfect mass of nests ;
VOL. IV. K K