1122 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXI. 



thej" dwell also socially but with a rigorous separation of the 

 sexes, such as I fancy is paralleled in no other species. Four to 

 eight are always found in the same vicinity, though seldom very 

 close together, and the males are invariably and entirely apart 

 from the females after they have grown up. Even in the season 

 of love, the intercourse of the sexes amongst adults is quite 

 transitory, and is conducted -v^dthout any of that jealousy and 

 pugnacity which so eminently distinguish most birds at that 

 period. 



" In the season of love, the troops of males and females come 

 into the same neighbourhood, but without mixing. A male that 

 is amorously disposed steps forth, and by a variety of very singular 

 proceedings, quite analogous to human singing and dancing, 

 recommends himself to the neighbouring bevy of females. He 

 rises perpendicularly in the air, humming in a deep peculiar tone 

 and flapping his wings. He lets himself sink after he has risen 

 some fifteen or twenty yards ; arid again he rises and again falls 

 in the same manner, and with the same strange utterance and 

 thus perhaps five or six times, when one of the females steps 

 forward and with her he commences a courtship in the manner 

 of a Turkey cock, by trailing his wings and raising and spreading 

 his tail, humming all the time as before. 



" When thus, with what I must call song and dance, the rites of 

 Hymen have been duly performed, the male retires to his com- 

 pany and the female to hers ; nor is there any appearance (I have 

 at some cost had the birds watched most closely) of further or 

 more enduring intimacy between the sexes than that just recorded, 

 nor any evidence that the male ever lends his aid to the female in 

 the tasks of incubation and rearing the young. 



" The procreative instinct having been satisfied, the female 

 retires into deep grass cover, and there, at the root of a thick tuft 

 of grass, with very little semblance of a nest, she deposits two 

 eggs, never more or less, unless the first be destroyed. If the 

 eggs be handled in her absence, she is sure to discover it and to 

 destroy them herself. The eggs are of a size and shape of an 

 ordinary domestic fowl's bat one generally larger and more richly 

 coloured than the other. 



