108 NATURAL HISTORY. 



■white egret, whose plumes, though, of course, smaller, are still 

 worth having. 



The cattle egret, with his buff plumes, can hardly he counted a 

 water-bird, and the bittern is rare; but the little paddy bird is 

 really one of the " features of the landscape" all over India. You 

 find him on everv stream and pond picking up fish, tadpoles, 

 crabs and what not, and occasionally swimming, or rather floating. 

 He does not, as far as I am aware, ever fish beyond his depth. The 

 sudden change of this little heron from a grey bird to a white 

 as he flies off is a real transformation ; and his moult from grey 

 to purple and white is quite a hard thing to get young naturalists 

 to believe in. The bittern is rare in our present province ; and 

 it would take up too much time to go further into the history of 

 the smaller herons, with which, indeed, this is not a favorite region. 



Of the great tribe of ducks and geese there are hardly any that 

 Avill not eat fish spaAvn whenever they can get it, and few that 

 do not occasionally pick up small fish, but the latter are not 

 the principal food of any found here, and during the rains, 

 which are the great spawning season of the fish, you might go all 

 through the Decean and Khandesh without seeing a single duck 

 or teal of any description, unless on some remote tanks which are 

 favoured by the 7nikia, or black and white goose, with its queer 

 bottle-nose, its duodecimo-edition, the cotton teal, and the bay- 

 coloured lesser whistling teal. Dr. Fairbank and myself have observed 

 the larger whistling teal in the Ahmednagar District, but I think 

 it is only a cold-weather visitor there, and it is certainly very rare. 

 It does, like the three above-mentioned, breed in other parts of 

 India. The whole four are very poor eating in the cold weather,, 

 when the migrant ducks are most numerous and in best condition ; 

 but they improve much in flavour in April and May, just when the 

 northern visitors are not to be had. This is easy enough to 

 understand if we consider that the northern waterfowl begin to 

 breed in late spring or early summer, and have got through the 

 trouble of raising their families in July and August. From that 

 time till the next spring they think of nothing but filling their 

 stomachs, and though they fall off a little in condition during 

 their long flight across the mountain barriers of India, they soon 

 recover it. The few snipe, for instance, that remain here till 

 April, which are celibate fowls with digestions unimpaired by any 

 affection of the heart, get to be mere balls of fat, and a tailor might 



