220 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XX. 



From a bend in one of these streams a bird got up and flew slowly and 

 silently away and I managed to secure it. When I shot it I thought it was a 

 Woodcock ; but on picking it up I was struck by its very bright plumage, and 

 came to the conclusion that it might be an immature one. On my return to 

 my house I sat down at once to identify it and found that it was a Solitary 

 Snipe, a species I had not met before. 



On the 2nd instant I was out again and " bagged " a Woodcock, a Pintail 

 Snipe (G. stenura) and a Partridge (Bambusicola fytchi). As the two species of 

 Snipe bear some outward resemblance, the following notes may be of interest 

 to other beginners like the writer. Placed side by side there is no difficulty 

 in recognising the Solitary Snipe by its greater size, by the very much more 

 restricted area of plain white on the under surface, and by the uniform olive 

 brown upper tail coverts, the corresponding feathers of the Pintail being 

 faintly but distinctly barred. G. solitaria bears, of course, no real resemblance 

 to the Woodcock with his pale forehead and distinctly marked crown and nape, 

 etc., and it was only the very cursory glance bestowed on it in the field and 

 the abysmal ignorance of a beginner that made such a confusion possible. 



The following is a table of a few measurements of the two species of snipe. 



Length of bill from gape 



Tip of shortest secondary to tip of longest 

 primary ... 



Wing 



Total length 



Tarsus 



Tail feathers total number 



„ „ broad middle ones 



„ ,, narrow ones on each side 



As regards other characteristics enumerated in The Fauna of British India, 



I did not find that the white bands on the under-wing coverts and axillaries 



were broader than the brown ones. 



I might add that a printer's error in the Volume referred to has given the 



Pintail only 2*25 inches of wing. 



It appears from Blanford's works that the Eastern Solitary Snipe is rather 



a rare winter visitant to such southerly latitudes as these, and as I have not 



seen it reported from this part of the country before, I thought its occurrence 



here might be worthy of record in our Journal. 



F. E. W. VENNING. 

 Haka, Chin Hills, 



ith January 1910. 



No. XIV.— DOVES NESTING ON THE GROUND. 



With regard to Mr. C. W. Allan's letter on the above subject in Vol. XIX., 

 No. 2 (p. 523) of our Journal, he may be interested to know that I found, 



