In practice no sisónes whatever are killed in set drives, and for twenty years we have abandoned the attempt as impossible. They nevertheless—alike with every other fowl of the air—must, by occasional mischance, fly into danger, and at such times, owing to their habit of flying in massed formation, a heavy toll may be levied at a single shot by a gunner who is alert to exploit the happy event. We have ourselves, in this casual way, dropped from five to eight sisónes with the double charge.
Though frequenting the same open terrain as their big cousins, the sisónes distinctly prefer the rough stretches of palmetto, thistles, and other rank herbage to corn-land proper—in short, they prefer to sit where they can never be seen on the ground. Conspicuous as their white plumage and resonant wing-rattle makes them in air, we can hardly recall a dozen instances of having detected a pack of little bustard at rest—and then merely in quite accidental and exceptional circumstances. And even then (as indicated) the knowledge of their precise position has seldom availed to their undoing.
By April the males have assumed a splendidly handsome breeding-dress. The neck, swollen out like a jargonelle pear, is clad in rich velvet-black, the long plumes behind glossy and hackle-like, and adorned with a double gorget of white. All this finery is lost by August. Thenceforward the sexes are alike save for the larger size and brighter orange of the males, the females being smaller and yellower. They are strictly monogamous, yet the males “show-off” in the same fantastic way as great bustard and blackcock. About mid-May the female lays four (rarely five) glossy olive-green eggs in the thick covert of thistles or palmettos.
In summer the food of the little bustard consists of snails and small grasshoppers, and on the table they are excellent, the breast being large and prominent and displaying both dark and white flesh—the latter, however, being confined to the legs.
CHAPTER XXVI
FLAMINGOES
THE QUEST FOR THEIR “INCUNABULA”
THE flamingo stands in a class apart. Allied to no other bird-form—hardly so much as related—it may be regarded almost as a separate act of creation. Its nesting habits, and the method by which a bird of such abnormal build could incubate its eggs, formed for generations a “vexed question” in bird-life. The story of the efforts made by British naturalists to solve the problem ranks among the classics of ornithology. The marismas of Guadalquivir were early known to be one of the few European incunabula of the flamingo; but their vast extent—“as big as our eastern counties,” Howard Saunders wrote—and the irregularity of the seasons (since flamingoes only remain to nest in the wettest years) combined to frustrate exploration. First in the field was Lord Lilford—as early as 1856; and both during that and the two succeeding decades he and Saunders (who appeared on the scene in 1864) undertook repeated journeys—all in vain. The record of these makes splendid reading, and will be found as follows:—
Lord Lilford, “On the Breeding of the Flamingo in Spain,” Proceedings Zoological Society of London, 1880, pp. 446-50; Howard Saunders, ibid., 1869, and the same authority in the Ibis, 1871, pp. 394 et seq.
The late Crown Prince Rudolph of Austria, who visited Spain in May 1879, likewise failed to reach the nesting spot—apparently through the usual cause, not going far enough—though a few eggs were found scattered on the wet mud of the marisma. (Recorded by Lord Lilford as above.)