22 COMMON BIRDS OF AN INDIAN GARDEN 



floods the low-lying areas around the town and 

 provides store of attractive food there in the shape 

 of drowned animals. As the floods increase this 

 supply diminishes as its sources are either swept 

 away or driven to take refuge in the higher parts of 

 the country, and with this the streets resume their 

 normal attractions as hunting-grounds. 



On evenings of those specially oppressive days 

 in summer that wind up with a violent storm from 

 the north-west, the kites mount in hundreds into 

 the upper air, where they wheel and drift about 

 seemingly without purpose, but probably really in 

 pure enjoyment of the cool currents that set in aloft 

 long before there has been anything to relieve the 

 stagnant heat at lower levels, and whilst any breeze 

 moving there is still breathing from the south. 



Very slight defects in their plumage often give 

 rise to curiously great effects in the flight of kites. 

 Any imperfection in the tail-feathers specially serves 

 to impart a markedly unsteady character to it. One 

 feels disposed to wonder how they manage to get on 

 at all during their moults, unless they either change 

 their feathers in the insensible fashion in which many 

 evergreens change their foliage, or in the kaleido- 

 scopic way characteristic of deciduous trees in the 

 tropics ; the habits of most raptorial birds seem to be 

 quite incompatible with any prolonged period of 

 seriously impaired flight, such as that attending the 

 moult of most other birds. 



