418 PHASIANIDJE. 



both in the low country and in the hills, laying, according to my 

 experience, from April to June. 



The hen makes her nest in any dense thicket bamboo-clumps, it 

 is said, by preference, though I have not noticed this to be the case, 

 composed of dry leaves, grass, and stems of soft herbaceous plants. 

 Sometimes the nest is large and comfortable ; sometimes it looks as 

 if the bird had made no nest, and merely laid on a heap of dry 

 leaves that it found handy, hollowing a receptacle for the eggs by 

 the pressure of its body. Sometimes, again, the bird has clearly 

 scraped a hollow in which to place the nest ; and sometimes it has 

 scraped up the earth all round, so as to make a sort of rim to the 

 nest and keep the materials firm. 



Many years ago, shooting in May for a month along the southern 

 side, chiefly, of the Sewaliks, my people and dogs between them 

 used to find me a nest almost every day, and once we found six 

 within a circle of 200 yards near the Bhinj-ka-khol. A large lota 

 of water was carried, and one or two eggs out of every batch 

 were tested to see if they would lie flat at the bottom, stand on end, 

 or float ; of course we took only the former, and these I used to 

 eat boiled and in omelettes, until I got perfectly sick of them. 

 In those days (I say it with pain and humiliation) the only use I 

 ever put eggs to was to eat them ; and in this particular case I was 

 punished, for since I took to collecting eggs, fate has so willed it 

 that I have never seen a single nest, and have only quite recently 

 succeeded in obtaining a very few from different localities. Well, 

 in all the many nests I have seen I never found more than nine 

 eggs, and, as well as I can remember, five or six were the usual 

 complement, even where the eggs were hard-set and floated. 



Captain Hutton says : " The Common Jungle-fowl is abundant 

 in some parts of the Dhoon, and in summer ascends the outer hills 

 to 5000 feet elevation. It lays its eggs on the ground with little 

 preparation of nest, contenting itself with scraping together a few 

 dry leaves and grass ; the eggs being from four to six generally, 

 though often more, of a dull white and very similar to those of 

 common Bantam Fowls, with which it will readily breed if domes- 

 ticated from the egg. 



" I have often reared the chicks under a domestic hen and turned 

 them loose, but after staying about the house for several days they 

 always eventually betook themselves to the jungles and disappeared. 

 If kept confined with other fowls, however, they readily interbreed, 

 and the broods will then remain quiet under domestication, and 

 always exhibit both in plumage and manner much more of the wild 

 than of the tame stock, preferring at night to roost on the branches 

 of trees. Mr. Blyth has remarked that his cross-bred eggs never 

 produced chicks, but I have never found any difficulty in this re- 

 spect. The crowing of the cock birds is very shrill and like that 

 of the Frizzled Bantams. In the wild state it is monogamous." 



Dr. Jerdon states that " the hen breeds from January to July, 

 according to the locality, laying eight to tw y elve eggs, of a creamy- 

 white colour, often under a bamboo clump or in some dense thicket, 



