ICuvi". X L. 



■pAUA. ;{i.l ^^ 



rare. Commonly I liave olisorved, snys Hume, tliat however 

 laroe the tlofk that comes in, it alights about tiie banks 

 of the lake or river in comparatively sniill detachments. 



'Wiqfoa. — They collect in very large flocks, says Stuart- 

 Bah-pr, sometimes numbering as many as seven or eight 

 liundnMl individuals, but more often will be foimd in flocks 

 of a hundred or so, and of cours?, where they are less 

 common, in small flocks of a dozen or less, often in pairs 

 or singly, but in the latter case always with some other 

 duck. 



Pintail. — Taken all round, snya Stuart Baker, the 

 Pintail is one of the commonest of Indian ducks, occurring 

 sometimes in huge flocks, Init more often in such as 

 number 40 to 60 individuals. It is lint rarely very small 

 flocks are seen and solitary birds or pairs hardly ever. 

 "Where they are least common, flocks of only twenty or so 

 may be met witli frequently, but this is about the mini- 

 mum number. As regards the maximum number, it is 

 hard to give figures, but Hume speaks of thousands in a 

 flojk, other writers of many hundreds in a flock. 



Garganey Teal. — As regards the numbers they arrive 

 in, 1 have a special note, Fhime whites, oi Imxing, found 

 a flock which I estimated to contain twenty thousind 

 individual-! at Rahun in the Etah district, o.\ the 28th 

 August 1865. Never before or since have I seen so huge 

 a bodv of fowl of one kind, and I have noted that T bagged 

 forty-seven of them beside losing at the time many 

 wounded Vnrds (I had no dogs with me) in the rushes. I 

 had s?nt my gun-punt (built exactly on tlie lines of one 

 of our Norfolk boats) a few days previously out there to 

 see that it was all right for the coming season, and I had 

 only taken with me a small but heavy j\Ionghyr-made 

 swivel-giin, carrying 8 ozs., to try. To my surprise, I 

 found the thickest body of fowl — on the open part of the 

 jhed — that I had ever seen. I loaded the swivel with No. 4 

 shot and worked up quite close to some of them and 

 within some fifty yards of the main body, when seeing that 

 they were all about to start 1 fired and knocked over at 

 least sixty ; I actually secured forty-seven. '^ This," says 

 S'lKirt-Biker, " was thirty-five years ago, and I fear that flocks 

 like this one are things of the past, though they may now 

 and then be met with in very vas*} flocks. All through the 

 Sunderbunds, and again on the Chilka Lake, they are often 

 to be seen in flocks of thousands, and in Ondh, the North- 

 West and Sind such flocks are by no means rare. As a 

 rule over most of its north and north-western range, the 

 flocks may roughly be said to average about and between 

 one to two hundred. To the east, I think, they average 

 smaller, and would put it somewhere between fifty and a 

 liundit'd. ,Sn!. II flocks of iive or six. or even ten and 



