ABAKAN HILL-PARTRIDGE 245 



should be prohibited for its destructive results, in all districts 

 where the natives do not really need wild creatures as food. 



In Tenasserini Davison found these birds curiously tame ; 

 they would perch within a few feet of him, and sit there gazing 

 and whistling, a proceeding strangely at variance with the usual 

 retiring habits of this group. He says, by the way, that the calf 

 is " a series of double whistles, commencing very soft and slow, 

 but gradually becoming more and more rapid, and rising higher 

 and higher, till at last the bird has to stop." This sounds as if 

 the note were quite unlike the single whistle of the common hill- 

 partridge, so that Hume was probably wrong in describing the 

 calls as identical ; in the call being some sort of a whistle all 

 these hill-partridges agree, but differences in detail are just what 

 might be expected. Blyth, by the way, found these birds rising 

 solitarily in Tenasserim, and in winter at that, so the social habit 

 is also liable to variation. The food of this species is seeds, 

 small snails, and berries, and like the last, they are great 

 scratchers among dead leaves. A heap of these has been found 

 to form the nest, and the eggs are white, of a dirty shade, and 

 very scantily and minutely speckled with grey. Four fresh ones 

 were taken below Darjeeling, on July 4th, by Mandelli ; but the 

 full clutch may be larger, and no doubt earlier ones are to be 

 found. 



Arakan Hill-Partridge. 



Arburicola intermedia. Toung-kha, Burmese. 



The hill-partridge of Arakan is so like the Tenasserim variety 

 of the rufous-throated that it seems ridiculous to make a 

 "species" of it, seeing that the rufous-throated itself varies 

 according as it inhabits the Himalayas or Tenasserim. In the 

 Arakan variety the black of the throat is concentrated into a 

 patch reaching up to the chin, though there are specklings else- 

 where ; the black border-line between the chestnut throat and 

 grey breast is wanting as in the Tenasserim rufous-throated 

 birds. 



Hume very appositely points out that "both in this race and 

 in the Himalayan one, specimens occur in which the black spots 



