“As the person comes to within 15 to 50 feet the bird flies off with a conspicuous initial downward dip, and then goes off to another tree, not necessarily in sight of the follower, in fact more often out of sight than not. Then it waits there, churring loudly until the follower again nears it, when the action is repeated. This goes on until the vicinity of the bees’ nest is reached. It waits there for the follower to open the hive and usually until the person has departed with his loot of honeycomb, when it comes down to the plundered bee’s nest and begins to feed on the bits of comb left strewn about. The time during which the bird may wait quietly may vary from a few minutes to well over an hour and a half.” African natives regard the bird as an almost infallible guide to honey. They try to attract it by grunting like a ratel or chopping on trees to imitate the sound of opening a nest. The habit is apparently instinctive; it presumably originated before human beings appeared, perhaps starting with the ratel or some of its honey-eating ancestors. Curiously enough, the honey bird does not seem interested in the honey, per se, or in the grubs of bees found in the nests. It has an insatiable appetite for the wax, which it will take wherever it can be found. The first account of the bird was of an individual which fed on the wax candles of a church. It appears to have a peculiar ability to digest wax presumably to extract the nutritive elements contained. _The Fantastic Sea Horse_ A fish with the head of a Lilliputian horse, the tail of a monkey, the shell of a beetle and the pouch of a kangaroo...a creature that reverses the ordinary course of nature in that “child bearing” is exclusively a function of the male.... Perhaps in no other animal have been packed so many anomalies as in the little hippocampus, popularly known as the “sea horse”. These weird creatures are almost world-wide in their distribution through ocean waters where there are growths of sea vegetation. They have provided the models for some of the monsters of human nightmares. Actually they are small, feeble, almost defenseless creatures. The head unquestionably is similar to that of a miniature horse in general outline. The neck, however, is not a neck at all. Fishes have no necks and hippocampus is no exception. What looks like a neck is the upper part of its abdomen, considerably contracted.