HUNTING & SHOOTING IN CEYLON 



green-edged, half-inch white ; primaries mostly green-black, 

 middle part of longer feathers white, extending across to 

 the inner tips ; tail coverts brown to greyish, the whole 

 stippled with small dots. 



Their haunt is about the same as the whistling-teal, 

 but when disturbed they fly, all together, at tremendous 

 speed, very near the surface of the water, uttering their 

 peculiar, somewhat guttural, twittering call, circling two or 

 three times only, eventually settling among weed growth 

 as remote as possible from the source of disturbance. 



Given a small undisturbed unshot tank, frequented by 

 these two kinds of teal, and a fine bag may be made, but 

 if a tank is pretty frequently shot over you will not get 

 many chances, the birds being up and away very quickly 

 without much waste of time in " circling." I once, near 

 Anuradhapura, with three other friends on a snipe-shoot- 

 ing trip, came upon a small tank of not more than 

 5 acres in extent, surrounded by dense forest with many 

 trees and bushes growing in the water, and every tree was 

 filled with whistling-teal perched on every branch. They 

 were literally in thousands, but they had retreated there 

 from a much-frequented tank which we had also cleared 

 out, and Tom Wright and I, the only members of the 

 party who had found this tank, merely succeeded in 

 bagging two or three before they were all up and off 

 again. Let me try and give my readers some idea of a 

 typical shoot, including tank and paddy field, in the low 

 country. 



Looking through my diary, the following seems to 

 about represent the style of shooting to be met with, at 

 any rate in the northern part of Ceylon : 



I and my neighbour Hodgson Bell had " biked " 100 

 miles to Vavoniya in the Northern Province to put in 



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