18 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XI. 



Egypt, Arabia, Asia Minor and frequently into Afghanistan. North- 

 West India is, however, the extreme south-east point to which it has 

 penetrated, not being on record as yet as having been obtained in 

 China or further East. 



In India it is only a very rare winter visitor, and as far as I can 

 learn from what is recorded, seldom, if ever, appears except in very 

 severe winters. As regards its occurrence within our limits, I can 

 merely quote what has already been written several times. I pillage 

 Hume and Marshall's Gramo Birds en bloc for this purpose, with many 

 apologies to the authors. Hume gives it as a pretty regular but rather 

 rare visitor to the Peshawar and Hazara districts, and as a straggler 

 to Kohat, Rawalpindi, and the Trans-Indus portion of Scind. 



The first bird recorded in India was shot by W. Mahomed Umar 

 Khan and placed in the Peshawar Museum, from which place it 

 eventually came into Hume's possession. This bird may be the one 

 now in the British Museum marked "2', Im sk. Peshawar, June," 

 only that W. Mahomed Umar Khan got his bird in January not 

 June. Regarding this bird Hume got the following letter which he 

 reproduced in extenso in Game Birds, and which I take the liberty 

 of again producing here together with other letters from the various 

 sportsmen who have had the luck to obtain swans :— 



" In the month of January, 1857, I shot this swan in the Peshawar 

 district in the Shah Alum river, about a mile and a half on this side 

 of the Kabul river. Neither before nor after have I seen other swans, 

 but a few years after I killed it I heard from the shikaries of 

 Hashtnagar (also in the Peshawar district) that they had recently 

 seen five of these birds in Agra (?) village lake, in this same district, 

 but had failed to shoot any/' 



The next birds Hume got were a pair of young birds received from 

 Captain Unwin in 1871. These birds were for some time thought to 

 be a new species and were called Cygnus unwini, after Captain Unwin 

 who shot them, and who wrote to Hume about them in this letter: — 



" To-day while duck shooting on the Jubbee stream on the border 

 of the Hazara and Rawalpindi districts, during a short halt for 

 breakfast on the banks of the nullah, I was attracted by seeing two 

 large white birds flying over the stream some 250 yards lower 

 down. The Jubbee has here a wide strong bed, with a small stream 



