File:Bombay ducks; an account of some of the every-day birds and beasts found in a naturalist's Eldorado (1906) (14770531933).jpg

Identifier: bombayducksaccou00dewa (find matches)
Title: Bombay ducks; an account of some of the every-day birds and beasts found in a naturalist's Eldorado
Year: 1906 (1900s)
Authors: Dewar, Douglas, 1875- Fayrer, Frederick Durand Stirling, 1869-
Subjects: Birds -- India Zoology -- India
Publisher: London, New York, J. Lane
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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is no other creature like unto it.It is about the size of a kite. Its plumage is dirty white,except the tips of the wings, which are shabby black.The neck is covered with feathers, which stick out likethe back hairs of a schoolboy. These are, if possible,rather dirtier-looking than the rest of the plumage, andfrequently assume a rusty hue. Its bill is yellow, soare its naked face and its legs. As Eha remarks : It does not stand upright, likethe true vultures, but carries its body like a duck andsteps like a recruit. There is told a story, which has by this time becomequite a seasoned chestnut, of a keen griffin goingout with his gun on the day after his arrival at his firststation in India. His bag for the day consisted of oneNeophron ginginianus. This he sent, on the advice ofa fellow-subaltern, to his Colonels wife, with a politenote expressing the hope that she would accept theresults of his first days shikar. The inventor of thisstory might read with benefit a certain address de-
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YOUN(; SCA\1,.N(,I.K \i I.M Kl, IN M., UGLIEST BIRD IN THE WORLD 279 livered by a certain Viceroy of India at a University nota thousand miles from Calcutta. The scavenger vulture is found all over India ; when,however, you come to the neighbourhood of Delhi hisbeak becomes less yellow and he grows larger. Need-less to say that this is quite sufficient provocation forthe manufacture of a new species. The scavenger vulture of the Punjab is known asNeophron perenopterus. This multiplication of speciesis doubtless a very fine thing. But it makes thingsexceedingly unpleasant for the birds that live in theregion where the races fuse with one another. Thesebirds do not know what to call themselves: their bill istoo yellow to allow their admission into \ht. perenopterusclan, and too dusky for the ginginianus tribe to haveanything to say to them. In such a case it would, Ithink, be as well to round off matters by creating athird species—Neophron neither-one-thing-nor-the-other. Qi the feedi

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