Even in my tent, in the midst of the comparatively loud noise of the busy camp of my numerous caravan, I can hear the clapping, rattling voice of this lark. Some hundreds of yards away it flies up into the sky, like our own skylark, and hovers about clattering in the air, so loudly and distinctly that if I did not know its character and habits, I would have been continually looking for it close to my tent. It is very hard to quite free oneself from this illusion. One continually thinks that one hears the cry of the bird in one’s immediate neighbourhood, the sound being produced much in the same way as that of the snipe. And yet another strange voice of a lark resounds in my ears: a melancholy, plaintive, soft sound, till now unknown to me and to most others. All night long its calls and cries resound about my camp. I should never have thought that it was a lark (_Mirafra intercedens_ Rchw.) that thus made itself heard in the night, as our woodlarks do in moonlight nights at home. It was at the cost of much careful research that the discovery was made of what bird produced this song. And the strange voice of yet another bird is inseparable from my recollections of the wilderness of East Africa. The xerophytic flora of the far-spreading thorny mimosa thickets gives shelter to a privileged member of the bird world, which is thus guarded in safety from all danger amid their thorny boughs and branches. I refer to a peculiar bird, belonging to the group of the Musophagidæ, grey-feathered, green-beaked, long-tailed, and adorned with a crest. This strange fellow roves about restlessly--a bird about as big as a jay, misleading the traveller with his cry in the most curious way. Science calls him _Chizaerhis leucogastra_, Rüpp.; the German language has given him the name “_Lärmvogel_” (“noisy bird”). And he has a perfect right to bear his name. There resounds somewhere near us, and in a way that completely deceives us, now the barking and snarling of a dog, now the bleating of sheep. Following the direction of the sound we look to see what produces it, and we find our bird hopping about nimbly upon the tops of the thorn-trees and acacias, appearing to have no anxiety about the thorny spikes of the branches, in which he makes his home. With a cleverness that borders on the miraculous he makes his way amongst them, protected by them against the attacks of birds or beasts of prey, and in his conscious reliance on the security of his dwelling-place, so to say, mocking at all enemies. So deceptive are his cries that at first, and especially when I was in the neighbourhood of native settlements, I was continually looking everywhere for sheep and their shepherds.