'272 INDIAN nrc'Ks 



On hiod, tliis little pochard is quite out of his element: it ran 

 walk all right, and get along well enough for purposes of slow 

 progression, but he is very awkward and shuffling in its movements, 

 and incapable of any appreciable increase in the speed of them under 

 the impulse of fear. 



It is, on the whole, a very silent bird. Hume says that : — 



" Their quack or note is peculiar, though something like tliat of 

 Ihe Pocliard, a harsh ' koor, kirr, kirr,' with which one soon becomes 

 acquainted, as they invariahly utter it ' staccato ' as they hustle up 

 from the rushes, often within a few yards of the boats." 



It is in reference to this bird, and Captain Baldwin's note on 

 the frequency he has shot it without an\- feet — not without one only, 

 but without either — that Hnme raises the point as to how their feet 

 have been lost, etc., and says that he himself has killed more than 

 fifty birds thus maimed. Frost-bite he dismisses from the list of 

 probable causes, and in this most of us will join him. But what 

 then, is the cause '' Crocodiles would not, as a rule, take a foot at 

 a time; traps are shown to be very unlikely agents; and one is 

 thrown back on the fish theory. This is an extremely likely one ; 

 for I have myself known domestic ducks to lose their limbs from the 

 attacks of a huge pike — indeed, when the birds were young and 

 weak, they often lost, not their feet only, but their lives also. 

 Ducklings constantly disappear in this manner. As there are many 

 other fish quite as voracious as the pike in other climates, this would 

 account very reasonably for so man\ birds losing one or more limbs. 



