416 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XII. 



No. YIII.-EAKLY MIGRATION OF THE RUDDY 

 SHELDRAKE. 

 It may interest you to know that, on the loth July this year, two Ruddy 

 Sheldrakes {Casarca rutila) settled down on the piece of artificial water we 

 have in the Zoological Gardens here. We have four or live of these birds in 

 our collection, and the wanderers made themselves quite at home for the 

 space of twenty-four hours ; thev disappeared again during the night. The 

 fact of these two birds passing over us so early in the year seems worthy of 

 notice. 



T. L. F. BEAUMONT. 

 Karachi, August, 1898. 



No. IX.— BOMBAY RATS. 



To kill rats is the duty of every good citizen of a great city like Bombay, 

 and the probability of a recrudescence of the plague this cold season makes 

 the duty more imperative. I am writing in the hope of inducing members of 

 this Society to turn their attention ti the rats killed in their houses. We are 

 apt to regard all rats as simply rats, belonging to the genus pest, and lying 

 almost outside the domain of natural history; but there is a great deal to be 

 cleared up yet about the rats of Bombay, and the publication of " The Fauna 

 of British India" seems to me only to h iVe added to the perplexity with 

 which the subject was invested before. During the last two months I have 

 caught eighteen rats in my bung^dow at Uran. Seventeen of these belonged 

 to the form which I have known for years as the common house rat of the 

 Bombay Presidency. They differed in no respect from each other except a 

 little in size, for some were young and some old. The colour was brown, 

 made up of tawny and grey, with a sprinkling of black hairs, princi- 

 pally along the line of the back. The under-parts were scarcely lighter 

 than the upper, but were more purely gray. Till a few years ago the 

 thought had never risen in my mind that this was anything else than 

 Mus decumnnus, the too-well-known Brown Rat of Europe. But when I 

 met Mr. Oldfield Thomas at the British Museum, he assured me that it was 

 nothing of the sort, but only one of the many forms of Mus rattus, the Black 

 Rat of Europe. When I asked him the difference between them, he said that 

 the essential difference was in the shape of the skuJl, but that the Brown Rat 

 might easily be distinguished by its coarser hair and shorter tail. In the 

 " Fauna of British India, '' Mr. Blanford has followed Mr. Thomas. He says 

 that the so-called Black Rat varies very much in size and colour, and he 

 describes three of the principal varieties or races of it ; but one mark by 

 which, according to him, the true Brown Rat that may be distinguished from 

 them all is, that its tail is never so long as the liead and body. By this mark 

 seventeen were undoubtedly Black Rats, though not black. One specimen^ 

 7 inches long, had a tail 8^" ; another, 6 inches long, had 9, tail 7", and 



