46 INDIAN DUCKS 



These ducks, however, are not entirely confined to such heavih- 

 forested country, but are frequently met with in smaller patches of 

 jungle in which there are pools and swamps, and I have received 

 numerous specimens shot in such places. They also frequent sluggish 

 streams and back-waters, but never, as far as my experience or 

 information goes, clear waters or swift-running streams. 



Very little information has been forthcoming about their call, 

 and very few sportsmen seem to have heard them. Colonel Graham 

 has recorded : " They roost on trees, and frequent solitary pools in 

 deep tree-jungle. They are always in pairs, and may be heard 

 calling to one another at great distances." This agrees well with 

 what I have known of them. My first experience of them was in 

 North Cachar ; when out shooting one rainy day in June I heard two 

 birds calling to one another in loud goose-like calls. The forest was 

 very dense and consisted almost entirely of trees with practically no 

 undergrowth, but through it there wandered a sluggish dirty steam 

 which here and there disappeared into small morasses, dotted with 

 tiny pools of clear water. Thinking the safest way to get a shot 

 would be to drive them, I sent my Cachari tracker to beat down 

 the stream towards me from a point some '200 yards or so above 

 where we heard them calling. The drive proved a total failure, as, 

 though the birds fiew within thirty or forty yards of me, they kept 

 inside the forest on the same side of the stream as that on which 

 I was seated, and I hardl\ caught a glimpse of them, much less 

 obtained a shot. The Cachari told me that when he came on the 

 first one it was in a tree, from which it did not fly until he was 

 underneath, and that then it made off to its mate, which was some 

 200 yards higher up the stream. They then both settled in a small 

 pool and did not again take wing until he had sneaked to within 

 twenty yards, when they got up and flew straight away, passing, as 

 I have already said, just out of sight of me. We heard them calling 

 in the sauie place for two or three days after this, but when attempts 

 were made to stalk them, they made off long before a sight was 

 obtained of them or a shot possible. 



The pair met with at Barpeta were seen when I was out shooting 

 Kya partridge in some ekra-covered patches of swamp surrounded 

 by forest. On this occasion a pair got up out of some swamp, some 



