252 
tured fish in every other case having proved light enough for 
the bird to fly away with when shot at.” 
As soon as one bird has made a capture, it is generally 
joined by its mate. ‘The latter usually stands a little apart for — 
a moment or two, as if to allow the capturer to satisfy the first - 
cravings of hunger, then sidles slowly up and begins with evi- 
dent diffidence to feed too. This, however, is only the case if the 
spoil is large. If the fish or the bird be small, the second comer 
does not attempt to approach ; but after a few minutes flies off. 
The scream of the Kingtail is very loud, shrill and thrilling, 
and its peculiar accents can never be mistaken after being once 
heard. 
To judge from the rough shagreen-like soles of their feet, 
fish is perhaps their natural food, but wounded or freshly killed 
Geese, Ducks, and even Snipe, and Sandpipers, are greedily 
seized, and devoured. It is noticeable, that when eating a 
Goose, or other large bird, this Hagle usually holds it on the 
ground, somewhere near the edge of the water, breast down- 
wards and breaking through the back, eats out the entrails, 
liver, &e., not touching the breast. 
Captain Hutton tells me, that they capture all kinds of game, 
Hares, and even young T’oxes ; but where I have observed them, 
water-fowl and fish have been their chief diet. Although in 
the Dhoon this species does not, Captain Hutton says, enter 
the Himalayahs, I have found them in Kumaon, far up the val- 
leys of the Kosila, Ramgunga, and Surjoo, at least an hundred 
miles in a direct line from the southern outskirts of the Hills. 
Professor Schlegel identifies our Indian species H. Fulviventer 
of Vieillot, with Pallas’s bird, and I have no doubt correctly so, 
but one of the dimensions given by him “ length 24 inches” is 
absurd, and must have been taken from a dried skin; the 
smallest adult male that I have yet seen measured 29 inches 
in length, while females run up to 34. His dimensions of 
wings and tail will do well enough ; but he has both tarsus and 
mid toe, exceptionally small, and the feet are not yellowish (at 
any rate in the adult) as he says, but greyish white, sometimes 
with a faint bluish tinge. I note that both feet and cere are 
wrongly coloured in Dr. Bree’s otherwise very tolerable figure. 
Professor Newton, from the examination of (I believe) a 
single sternum, was disposed to separate our Indian and.the 
Crimean races, but the sterna of Hagles differ greatly at times 
in the same species, while other specimens may be obtained 
belonging to clearly distinct species, which are utterly undis- 
tinguishable ; and so far as my experience goes, no reliable 
conclusions as to the specific distinctness, or identity of nearly 
