Mr. A. Hume on Indian Ornitholuyy. 33 



For birds of prey that one shoots so often in the act of tearing 

 some helpless innocent victim to pieces, one has little com- 

 punction ; but with gentle vegetable-eating birds like these, 

 who seem to love each other so well, and so much, and who 

 for so long evince their sense of the loss of any of the family 

 party, the case is different, and no feeling man can kill any of 

 them, I think, without a pang. As for myself, nothing but the 

 rarity of these birds, the paucity of information in regard to 

 them, and their being desiderata in so many important museums, 

 could have induced me to kill so many of them as I have ; and I 

 sincerely hope I shall never need to kill another. I do not 

 know how it is ; but I have often wished that 1 could be quite 

 sure that the wholesale murder of these and similar innocent 

 animals merely for scientific purposes, and not for food, was 

 quite right. Intellectually, I have no doubt on the subject ; 

 but somehow, when a poor victim is painfully gasping out its 

 harmless life before me, my heart seems to tell me a somewhat 

 different tale. 



Throughout their sojourn here, the young remain as closely 

 attached to their parents as when they first arrived; but, 

 doubtless, by the time the party return to their northern homes 

 the young are dismissed, with a blessing, to shift for themselves. 



Long before they leave, the rich buff or sandy colour has 

 begun to give place to the white of the adult plumage, and the 

 faces and foreheads, which (as in the Common Crane) are 

 feathered in the young, have begun to grow bai'c. This, I 

 notice, seems to result from the barbs composing the vanes of 

 the tiny feathers falling off and leaving only the naked hair-like 

 shafts. Even when they leave us, however, there is still a good 

 deal of buff about the head, upper back, lesser and median 

 wing-coverts, longer scapulars, and tertials of the young, while 

 the dingy patch along the front of the tarsus is still well 

 marked. 



Each year several small parties of birds are noticeable un- 

 accompanied by any young ones, and never separating into 

 pairs. These, when they first come, still show a few buff 

 feathers, and have a dingy patch on the tarsus ; and (hough 

 before they leave us they become almost as purely white, and 



N. S. VOL. IV. 1) 



