10 INDIAN SPORTING BIRDS 



black and yellow tail-coverts conceal the tail, and give the bird 

 a very stunip-{!nded look; in fact, in life it is not so beautiful 

 as artists make it, but looks thick-headed and top-heavy, lovely 

 as its plumage looks in the dead specimen. It is also, in 

 captivity at any rate, very quiet and uninteresting. 



The weight of a male is about a pound and a half ; his note 

 is a whistle, while the duck has the ordinary quack, five times 

 repeated . 



This bird breeds in Siberia and winters in Japan and south- 

 eastern Asia, including India ; as Hume very accurately suggested 

 it might be, it certainly is connnoner in India than the clucking 

 teal, a bird of similar range, although it is certainly one of our 

 rarities still. Hume had got no less than five specimens of it 

 by the time he published his account in the " Game-birds " at 

 the end of the seventies, nearly all of them in Oudh ; but it 

 has since been found further east, as far as Upper Burma and 

 Manipur. The Calcutta Bazaar is a good place to get it ; one 

 of Hume's five came from there, and from 1897 onwards for 

 the next four or five years I never missed seeing it, and in 1900 

 and 1901 it could fairly be called common. I have seen a dozen 

 or more in a good season, but I should say not twenty-five per 

 cent, were males. The male in undress, by the way, is almost 

 exactly like the female, but has the inner quills black and grey, 

 rather like their colouring, when long and curved, in the full 

 plumage ; the true sickle feathers, like the Mandarin's fans, do 

 not appear till the rest of the plumage is perfect. Fresh-caught 

 birds are very wild, and the species is said to be a strong flyer. 



Pintail. 



Dafila acuta. Sink-par, Hindustani. 



The elegant clipper-built pintail is at once conspicuous by 

 his racing lines among all our ducks, his long neck and long 

 sharp tail making him conspicuous either in the air or on the 

 water. His colouring is chiefly remarkable for the large amount 

 of white, this reaching below from the liver-brown head to the 

 black stern ; the upper-parts are of the finely lined grey so 

 common among the males of the duck tribe. 



