576 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XII- 



to hover against the oBBce window, tapping with her beak and flapping with 

 her wings. This year, for months, an ordinary cr(;w has presented himself 

 at a small window at 4 a.m. every morning, cawing and pecking alternately, 

 and this has been repeated at intervals during the day. In neither case 

 could wc discover any reason for the birds acting in this curious manner. 

 On several occasions we have tried to shoot this crow and so lengthen our 

 morning slumber, but he is very wary and so far we have failed to kill him, 

 I once caught the Honey-sucker in my hand when she had succeeded in get- 

 ting inside her favourite window, but I noticed nothing peculiar about her 

 beak. 



MAEY W. BOURDILLOiN'. 

 Dakjeeling, 2th May, 1809. 



No- VIII.— HYBERNATION OF BLACK AND BROWN BEARS. 



With reference to my article on this subject, which appeared in our Jour- 

 nal on page 218 of this volume, I beg to add the following account I receiv- 

 ed from a very reliable source a few days ago, clearly proving that the brown 

 hQ?kv {^Ursus arc tus) does hybernato. The man in question has a lot to do 

 with forest life, both during winter and summer, so may be considered a 

 pretty good authority. 



He informed me that he found a brown bear last March, in the hollow 

 trunk of a tosh tree in the Koti. The forest is about three miles from the 

 Rotung Pass, in Kulu, at an elevation of about 11,000 feet. The country was 

 a couple of feet under snow, but he could not find any foot-prints to show 

 that the bear had been in or out of the tree of late, so presumably it had 

 spent the winter rhere. A little later he came upon a black bear which had 

 been killed by the fall of the tree in which it must have been asleep. It was 

 in very poor condition, but it possessed a magnificent coat. 



On the 19th of April this year while out after bara-sing in Kashmir I came 

 upon the perfectly fresh tracks of a brown bear in the snow and which came 

 out of an enormous hollow tosh tree. There were plenty of dry leaves inside 

 the hollow and every indication of a bear having made its home there, but I 

 could see no sign or foot-print showing that it had only lately come into the 

 tree, so my natural conclusion was that it had spent the winter there. 



As for black bears {U. torquatus) I believe it entirly depends on where the 

 winter finds them. Those that have gone up to higher altitudes after the 

 Indian corn crops have been cut and are caught there by the December 

 snows hybernate, while those tliat are able to make their way down to the 

 oak forests, at about 15 or 4,000 feet above the sea-level do not hybernate, as 

 I have seen and shot black bears below Mussoorie in January and February. 



C. H. DONALD. 



BUADARWAR, KASHMIR STATE, May, 1899, 



