Water Transport by Sandgrouse
Water transport in the feathers of birds is not unique to the sandgrouse, but the sandgrouse have developed the technique to a stage far beyond that of any other bird. That this should have happened in birds of arid zones is not surprising; what is not immediately obvious is how it happened. The first documented accounts of water transport in sandgrouse are of captive males carrying water in their belly feathers to their young (Meade-Waldo 1896, 1897, 1906, 1921, St. Quintin 1905). These observations were disbelieved and discredited by later ornithologists (e.g., Hile and Etch6copar 1957, Meinertzhagen 1954, Stegmann 1969). Meinertzhagen even went so far as to initiate the myth that the male sandgrouse regurgitates water from his crop to the incubating female and that both sexes provide their young with water in this way. This has since proven to be patently untrue. Why it should have been necessary to fabricate a story when the truth was so much more fascinating and worthy of investigation, is hard to understand.