122 INDIAN SPORTING BIRDS 



them. It may be that it is on account of being shot for food, 

 although the Burmese do not like them being killed, that the 

 disposition of this race of sarus is different from that of the 

 Western form ; it is sh}^ and wary, needing to be approached by 

 a bullock cart, or in the rains by a canoe. The hen has a silly 

 habit of standing on top of her nest at daylight, and calling — 

 a proceeding calculated to give away her family affairs. The 

 eggs of this sarus appear to run lighter than that of the other, 

 having only a few rufous blotches, or even being all white. 



But the only thing really distinctive about the habits of 

 this bird is that it is to some extent migratory, assembling in 

 numerous bands and taking long and high flights. Anderson, at 

 Ponsee, saw them passing in V-shaped flocks in the direction 

 of the Burmese valley, flying so high as to only appear as specks. 

 Nine such flocks, each numbering about sixty birds, assembled 

 above the high mountain where he was camped, and commingled, 

 with aerial evolutions, breaking up into two masses, and then 

 into the V-formation again in smaller groups. Nothing like this 

 is ever seen with the Indian sarus. Davison also saw bands, 

 numbering up to sixty birds in each, arrive near Thatone in 

 August ; there is evidently a good deal to be made out about the 

 migration of this bird, as in the case of so many tropical species 

 wrongly believed to be stationary. 



Common Crane. 



Grus communis* Kullung, Hindustani. 



One of the points in which India recalls classical times in 

 Europe is the yearly winter visitation of the common crane, an 

 enemy to the farmer, just as it was in the time when .^sop's 

 fables were written. Everyone knows the fate of the misguided 

 stork whose virtue did not save him when caught with the cranes, 

 and Virgil complains of cranes as well as geese in enumerating 

 the troubles of the Roman agriculturist. 



At home the crane is now the rarest of visitants, and the 

 common heron often usurps its name; and as this bird is found in 



* cinerea on plate. 



