The people about the village were feeding their dogs and pigs with a kind of gruel in wooden troughs, and as the animals were judged to have enough, each was smacked on the head and sent off; no greediness nor crowding was allowed, and the pigs were far better behaved than the generality of their species. We found the jungle near the houses quite impracticable, both from its tangled nature and the steepness of the ground it covered. A walk along the shore produced only a whimbrel (_Numenius phoeopus_), which, although not bad for the pot, is too wide-spread a species to be of much value ornithologically. Experiences next day on the opposite side of the bay were little more encouraging. Scrambling up a steep hill, we found a small stretch of flat land on the top, where ran one or two faint paths, along which the traps were placed. Birds were very scarce, and as it began to rain, we returned to the dinghy, and rowed round the bay, looking for kingfishers. The boat was paddled up all the creeks in the thick belt of mangroves that fringe the shores, but there was no sign of the bird we were after--the large stork-billed _Pelargopsis_--and we had to be content with whimbrels. The creeks, which in many cases are only just broad enough to row in, often wind for long distances among the mangroves, and on a dull day are depressing places, with but little life in them. In the bay itself we saw many beautiful branching corals of kinds far too delicate to grow in the more disturbed water of the sea; much of the growth which spreads all over the bottom was, however, killed by the mud and fresh water that comes down through the mangroves.