QUERQUEDULA CIKCIA. 191 



Even in tho west the Garganey is not ahvays the lirst, the Common 

 Teal being sometimes the first recorded. 



It is very noticeable that, though in migrating south the birds once in 

 India take long to work further down the Peninsula, yet they work north 

 very speedily. 



In Northern India they arrive in September, and have even been seen 

 as early as August, but, according to Theobald and others, they do not get 

 to Southern India before December. Leaving, however, they delay until 

 March and April, much the same time that they leave all portions of their 

 winter home, though everywhere a few stay through May and even into 

 June. 



As regards the numbers they arrive in, Hume's notes on his enormous 

 bag atone time shows what may be sometimes seen. He writes : — " I have 

 a special note of having found a flock, which I estimated to contain twenty 

 thousand individuals, at Rahun in the Etawah district, on the 28th August, 

 1865. Never before, or since, have I seen so huge a body of fowl of one 

 kind, and I have noted that I have bagged forty-seven of them besides 

 losing at the time many wounded birds (I had no dogs with me) in the 

 rushes. I had sent my gun-punt (built exactly on the lines of one of our 

 Norfolk boats) a few days previously out there to see that it was alright 

 for the coming season, and I had taken with me a small but heavy 

 Monghyr-made swivel-gun, carrying only 8 ozs., to try. To my surprise I 

 found the thickest body of fowl — on the open part of the jhil — I had ever 

 seen. I loaded the swivel w^ith No. 4 shot and worked up quite close to 

 some of them, and within some fifty yards of the main body, when seeing 

 they were all about to start, I fired and knocked over at least sixty, I 

 actually secured forty-seven.^'' 



This was thirty-fiye years ago, and I fear that flocks like this one are 

 things of the past, though they may now and then be met with in very 

 A'ast flocks. All through the Suuderbunds, and again on the Chilka Lake, 

 they are often to be seen in flocks of thousands, and in Oudh, the North- 

 West, and Sind such flocks are by no means rare. 



As a rule, over most of its north and north-western range, the flocks may 

 roughly be said to average somewhere about and between one to two 

 liundred. To the east, I think, they average smaller, and would put it 

 somewhere between fifty and a hundred. Small flocks of five or six, or 

 even ten or twelve, are not, I think, at all commonly met with, while pairs 

 and single individuals are hardly ever seen. 



The Garganey haunts almost any kind of water, not, as a rule. 



