FIRST LIST OF THE BIRDS OF THE SOUTH KONKAN. 5 



wooded groves which mark, like oases in a desert, the village 

 sites and homesteads of a patient, thrifty, law-abiding- population. 

 You would see that while the valleys and alluvial banks of 

 the rivers are the only really arable land the tract can boast 

 of, picks and hoes have not been idle in bringing under culti- 

 vation steep hill slopes and stony plateaus. Wherever the 

 crumbling rock gives two or tree inches depth of free soil, 

 there are sown, transplanted and reared, with infinite labour, 

 slender crops of coarse hill grains. Wherever, on the sides or 

 near the base of a rugged hill, a portion of the flood water that 

 scours the slopes in torrents during the rainy season can be 

 gathered and held, there you see rows of tiny terraced rice 

 fields, levelled and banked in with infinite skill and labour. 

 You would marvel at the minuteness of the work, while you 

 admired the patience and care of the cultivator, and would 

 moralise on the struggle for existence which the expendi- 

 ture of such laborious toil on such unkindly soil 

 betrays. Sir George Wingate, the father of the Bombay Re- 

 venue Survey, when he first visited Ratnagiri profession- 

 ally, placed on record his opinion that the cost of surveying the 

 district would exceed the value of the fee-simple of the entire 

 land, Exaggerated, of course, as this statement was, you would 

 see at once from your balloon that a detailed field survey would 

 be no light work. And, knowing the density of the population, 

 you would at once rightly guess that no part of the district can 

 produce food sufficient for the inhabitants. Large imports of 

 grain are, indeed,an annual necessity, and in the poorer villages 

 on the slopes and spurs of the Ghats which these imports fail to 

 reach, the frugal hill peasantry, after exhausting their scanty 

 stock of Harik (Paspalum scrobiculatum) , (which, by the way, 

 is rank poison unless specially prepared by steeping in cowdung 

 and water,*) habitually subsist, for several months, i. e., until the 

 next harvest, on wild plantains, roots, and other jungle produce. 



The exports of local produce are few, and consist of salt fish, 

 shell lime, fins and maws, of four or five species of sharks and 

 saw fish, cocoanuts, coir fibre, and betelnuts. 



The pressure of the population is relieved by an annual migra- 

 tion of some 100,000 able-bodied men to Bombay and other places. 

 Soon after the harvest is reaped, and the fair weather has set 

 in, — leaving a slender store of grain (all that a rack-renting 

 farmer and a grasping money-lender has left untouched) for the 

 women and children, and the old and weakly of both sexes — they 

 wend their way by land or sea to Bombay, returning again to 



* A party of Vaghir convicts who escaped, after a serious outbreak, from the 

 Ratnagiri Jail, were caught, after a long hunt, in a state of utter collapse, brought on 

 by eating raw Harik plucked from standing crops. 



