ys 
| MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 183 
in order to watch the bird more intently before shooting it, What did 
happen was that whenever the hawk poised itself in air preparatory to 
striking, the duck dived incontinently, and on re-appearing after some 20 to 30 
seconds immediately disappeared again, keeping all the time very much in 
the same place. 
After some five minutes of this the hawk went off disappointed, and I now 
approached nearer still. I was more than ever struck by the very peculiar 
appearance of the bird ; it was swimming very low in the water, was of a dusky 
brown, almost blackish colour with white bars above and below the bill, the 
lower broader than the upper one ; its tail was carried when swimming always 
at a right angle to the body and was thin, stiff, and wedge-shaped with the 
angles rounded off; when it dived the tail was straightened out, and then 
appeared much longer and was the last thing to disappear under water. 
After watching it for some time, and since it would not rise as I came nearer, 
but merely swam away from me diving every now and then, I ran up after 
one of these disappearances and shot it as it rose, 
Its measurements were as follow :— 
Length 163 inches, wing 63 inches, tail from vent 33 inches. Tarsus 12 
inches, hind toe and claw 23 inches, Bill at front 12 inches, Bill from gape 
1Z inches. Breadth across back between wings 43 inches. The tail consisted 
of 19 (these were carefully counted two or three times over) narrow linear 
feathers, with fine, narrow, short, and separate webs, bare at the tips, stiff and 
spinous ; it reminded one, when it was first seen and still wet, not a little of 
the fin of a fish.’ 
The bill was blackish-plumbeous, curiously swollen at the base ; the irides 
brown, the legs dark plumbeous, The description given on pp, 436-437 of the 
Appendix to the 3rd Volume of Hume and Marshall’s Game Birds of India, 
Burma and Ceylon is so closely applicable to the present specimen in most 
of its details that I merely give the following slight variations :— 
“ A narrow white stripe lightly streaked with brown runs from the base of 
the upper mandible on each side to the base of the occiput, both stripes 
nearly meeting in the middle line behind, and broader behind than in front. 
Below these, from the gape, runs a brown stripe, the feathers edged with 
yellowish-brown, broader behind than in front. On the breast the tips of the 
feathers are of an almost chestnut tinge as far as the upper part of the breast 
is concerned, passing to a less rufous and a lighter yellowish-brown lower 
down in the middle and to a darker and less distinct pencilling on the sides of 
the lower chest and abdomen. About the vent isa little dull white, by no 
means a pure white, The bird was a female,” 
A, J. MACNAB, F.R.CS., Carr., LMS., 
Medical Officer, Q. O, Corps of Guides, 
MarDAN, PesHawar District, November, 1899, 
