Identifier: birdlore211919nati (find matches)
Title: Bird lore
Year: 1899 (1890s)
Authors: National Committee of the Audubon Societies of America National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals National Audubon Society
Subjects: Birds Birds Ornithology
Publisher: New York City : Macmillan Co.
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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skirts of villages, but the Flamingoes, although they apparentlyare not pursued by man, show a lack of conlideiue in him whicii induces themto take ilight long before one comes within gunshot. No one seemed to knowwhen or where the Flamingoes nested, but it should not. be diihcult to findtheir breeding-grounds. The voyage across Lake Titicaca is designed to speed the traveler on hisway rather than to give him an opportunity to see this beautiful body ofwater, with its Inca-lerraced islands, its i)ast()ral shores and, toward the east,stupendous wall of snow-covered mountains. The through steamer leaves Punoat nightfall, on the arrival of the train from Arequipa, and reaches Guaqui onthe Bolivian side of the lake the following morning at 7 oclock. A smallersteaiper, which dehvers freight at the small Indian villages on the lake, takesthree days for the same trip. Only native passengers are expected to patron-ize this l)oat, and the food is designed to meet their tastes rather than those
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O T3 -g 3 164 Bird - Lore of foreigners, but the slight discomforts of the journey are more than offsetby the glimpses it affords of Titicacan life, both human and feathered. The myriads of water-birds which inhabit the lake congregate chiefly inthe shallow bays where there is a dense growth of the reeds from which thenatives make their canoe-like balsas. These places are, unfortunately, notvisited by the steamer; nevertheless, birds are constantly in sight in varyingnumbers, both along the shores of the lake and in open water. There wereDucks (chiefly Pintails), Coots, Gulls, Cormorants and Grebes of several species.One of the latter (Centropelma micropterum) furnishes an admirable lesson in the effects of disuse, for since itsarrival, in the remote past, onTiticaca it has had so little use forits wings in the air that it has lostthe power of flight. It is a fairlylarge bird, about the size of ourHolboells Grebe, but its wings,presumably through disuse asorgans of flight, have become

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