THE FRANCOLINS. I09 



Perdix orie?ifalis, J. E. Gray, 111. Ind. Zool. pi. 56, fig. 2 



(1830-32). ^ 

 Ortygornis pOfidicerianuSy Hume and Marshall, Game Birds of 



India, ii. p. 51, pi. (1879); Gates, ed. Hume's Nests and 



Eggs Ind. B. iii. p. 435 (1890). 



Adult Male and Female. — General colour above a mixture of 

 chestnut and brown, barred with buff; below whitish-buff, 

 closely barred with narrow wavy black bars. The i?iale has a 

 pair of sharp spurs. Total length, 12*5 inches; wing, 5-8; 

 tail, 3*5 ; tarsus, r6. 



Range, — South-western Asia, from Eastern Arabia and South 

 Persia to India and Ceylon. Amirante and Mascarene Islands 

 [introduced]. 



Habits. — From Mr. Hume's excellent account of the Grey 

 Partridge, as it is called in India, the following notes on its 

 habits are extracted : — 



" Dry warm tracts, interspersed with scrub or low grass 

 jungle, in the neighbourhood of cultivation, are what it 

 specially affects, and the stunted acacia or wild date thickets 

 or prickly pear hedges, that so often encircle our villages, are 

 favourite haunts. So, too, are the hedges in some parts of the 

 country enclosing every field, the bush-clad banks of nallrs 

 and broken ground, and ravines running down to rivers, more 

 or less thinly or thickly studded with low catechu, acacia, or 

 other scrub. 



"Morning and evening they will be found in the fields or 

 pecking about on the highways and byeways, but their homes 

 are in the scrub, or in low thorny trees, in which many of 

 them, in such localities, roost, and on which they may be 

 found perching, at times, at almost any hour of the day. 



" But provided the locality be dry and warm and the ground 

 broken, no want of scrub or cultivation, no lack of trees and 

 hedges, seems to banish them. I have shot them in the most 

 desolate spots near the bases of the hills in Sind and on the 



