A fine large fish-hawk, with gold-fringed eye and yellow legs, bluish- black plume, and grey neck-feathers, haunts the Island and the coast: the other raptores are the brown kites (F. chilla), the scavengers of Asia and Africa. As at Aden, so here, there are no common crows or sparrows; the place of the former is taken by the African species (corvus scapulatus), with white waistcoat, popularly called the ‘parson crow,’ and the latter appears in the shape of the Java variety, which, introduced about thirty years ago (1857) by Captain Ward, a Salem ship- captain, has multiplied prodigiously. Green birds, like Amedavats, muscicapæ of sorts, especially the ‘king-crow’ of India, here called ‘Drongo,’ abound; and visitors, like the French savant on the Dead Sea, speak of a humming-bird, a purely New World genus, probably mistaking for it a large hawk-moth. The parroquet resembles the small green species of India: it is tamed and taught to talk. Zanzibar cannot boast of the Madagascar parrot, a plain, brown, thick-bodied bird, celebrated for distinct articulation.[48] Martens do not build at Zanzibar (?): they halt at the Island in their migrations; and one kind, it has been remarked, never remains longer than four to five days. After the rains the lagoons are covered with wild-duck, mallard, and widgeon. The snipe (jack, common, and solitary), a bird which everywhere preserves its fine game flavour, is found on the Island and in the central Continent. Sandpipers (charadrius hiaticula) run on the beach, and the waters support various kinds of cranes, gulls, and terns. When fewer ships visited the port, the sand-spit projecting from ‘Frenchman’s Island’ was covered with bay-turtle[49] (chelone esculenta or Midas), which the negroes were too indolent or ignorant to catch. The iguanas or harmless crocodiles (οὐδένα δὲ ἀνθρώπων ἀδικοῦσιν) of the Periplus, have not yet been killed out of Zanzibar—and there are several species.[50] Until lately the true crocodile was found in a small sweet stream about eight miles south of the town, and the monsters swarm in every river of the mainland.