60 INDIAN SPORTING BIRDS 



Bar-hcadcd Goose. 



Anser iiuUcus. Kareiji Hans, Hindustani. 



Although not breeding in India, but a winter visitor only, 

 this is the wild goose of the country, visiting it in enormously 

 greater numbers than any other species, and being far more 

 widely distributed. The white head marked with two black 

 cross-bars is unique among geese, but this colouring is not 

 found in the young of the year, which have the crown brown 

 continuous with the back of the neck. The real and most 

 striking peculiarity is the pure light grey colour, more like that 

 of the ordinary gulls than the usual brownish grey of geese in 

 general : the legs are orange, and the bill the same or lighter, 

 black-tipped. These geese seldom weigh quite six pounds. 



The bar-headed goose is commonest in Upper India, but is 

 not plentiful in the Central Provinces, and decidedly rare further 

 south. To the east it is common in Upper Burmah, and ranges 

 into Manipur, where it is called kang-nai. Ceylon it does not 

 visit at all ; none of the true geese occur there, in fact, all being 

 essentially birds of the north. From Gujarat it is also absent, 

 but at the opposite end of India, in Western Bengal, extremely 

 numerous. 



Like geese generally, it is eminently a gregarious bird, and 

 the flocks are sometimes very large ; they may contain as many 

 as five hundred birds. Hume says that he has seen as many as 

 ten thousand, in flocks of varying sizes from one hundred up, 

 on a ten-mile reach on the Jumna. Of course large birds like 

 these, in such numbers, do an enormous amount of damage to 

 crops, all sorts of herbage, whether of pulse or grain, coming 

 nito their bill of fare, though late rice is perhaps the favourite. 

 As they commonly feed at night, though when undisturbed they 

 will graze up to 9 a.m., and long before dark, a great deal of 

 harm can be done without much chance of its being averted. 

 After a course of this sort of feeding, they are in fine condition 

 for the table at the appropriate time of Christmas ; but when 

 they first come in, in October, they are thin and in poor case. 

 As a general rule they all leave for the north again in March or 

 early April. This goose prefers rivers to standing water for 



