Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/795

Rh thought this bird to be a jacana (Fig. 8), in which he was entirely wrong, as the jacanas are now known to stand as a family—the Jacanidæ—connecting the rails with the snipe-plover group (Limicolæ), with the closer affinity with the latter. Young chakas are frequently reared by the natives from the nest and employed as guards in the poultry yards, a task performed by them with marked success, armed as they are with the spurs upon their wings. They in Nature build a light nest of rushes, often in the water in the shallowest parts of the lagoons where they resort, and in this they lay some half a dozen buffy-white eggs. Nestling chakas are



covered with a clay-colored down, which is probably also true of the young of P. cornuta. These birds—that is, the crested screamers—are given at times to rising to great heights in the air, where they soar in circles, ever and anon uttering their piercing cries of "chaka!" "chaka!" "chaka!" and when a number of them are thus engaged it offers a sight not likely to be forgotten by the observer.

Passing on next to the parrots, we find them to be a