224 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXII. 



"It is common enough in all the less cultivated and more jungly 

 parts of Guzerat, preferring more or less hilly country where the 

 jungle is not too dense, and rarely, if ever, resorting to the open 

 plains beloved of the Common Sand-Grouse. During the monsoon 

 months, however, it does sometimes visit the more civilized parts, 

 bat only where there are trees, for instance, I have seen it at Baroda 

 in the month of June. 



" It does not ordinarily collect, in large numbers like the Common 

 Sand-Grouse and, as far as I can recollect, I have never seen more 

 than seven or eight together, except when the flocks meet at a 

 common drinking place. It differs, too, from the common species, 

 and from the Imperial Sand-Grouse in its drinking habits. These 

 two, as is well-known, drink in the morning after the sun has 

 become hot and sometimes also, at least in the case of P. exustus, a 

 couple of hours or so before sunset. P. fasciatus, on the contrary, 

 always drinks at dusk, never in my experience before the sun 

 is well below the horizon. 



" It is a much more silent bird than P. exustus and, unlike the 

 latter, it flies alwaj^s within a few feet of the ground, so that it 

 rarely shows up against the sky line and is not too easy a bird to 

 shoot in the fading twilight. It does not, however, take as much 

 killing as its notoriously tough relative, falling when hit, to smaller 

 shot at greater distance. 



" On one occasion, when I was sitting up for a panther near a 

 pool in a river bed, in the North of the Mahi Kantha Agency, the 

 Painted Sand-Grouse kept coming to drink in the gathering dusk 

 in small parties until there were, at a rough estimate, about 150 

 birds collected at the water's edge in a patch of some thirty yards 

 in length. This is the only time I have seen so large a number 

 together, and quite a noise they made with their chattering, both as 

 they arrived and on the ground before drinking. The single note, 

 softer and lower than that of the Common Sand-Grouse, I have 

 never heard except at dusk. When they alight on the ground 

 they drop very suddenly and then squat like a nightjar. 



" Although I have never personally seen this Grouse drink except 

 at dusk, it is not impossible that, in the hot weather, it may also 

 sometimes drink at dawn before the sun is up. I have more than 

 once seen it on the wing at this time of the day." 



Hume mentions the fact of their drinking in the morning and 

 Blanford also says that they fly to water before sunrise and after 

 sunset, but neither of these writers give any further details as to 

 their watering in the early dawn. 



Mr. Adams, as quoted by Hume, gives a rather similar account of 

 the visit of these birds to a small pond in an Acacia grove, and in 

 this says that his attention was first drawn to the birds by the 

 "peculiar chocli, cluck yv\n.ch fasciatus makes when rising, " he also 



