Note 612 — Chapter XVI · ON FORM AND MECHANICAL EFFICIENCY

They are “wonderfully fitted for ‘vanishment’ against the flushed, rich-coloured skies of early morning and evening .... their chief feeding-times”; and “look like a real sunset or dawn, repeated on the opposite side of the heavens,—either east or west as the case may be”: Thayer, Concealing-coloration in the Animal Kingdom, New York, 1909, pp. 154–155. This hypothesis, like the rest, is not free from difficulty. Twilight is apt to be short in the homes of the flamingo: and moreover, Mr Abel Chapman, who watched them on the Guadalquivir, tells us that they feed by day.