230 IXDIAN DUCIvS. 



good qualities are, however^ quite overshadowed hy the fact that -when .-hot 

 and caught it is no longer -worth anything, for so rank and coarse is the 

 flesh generally, that it is quite uneatable. The condemnation of the 

 White-eye as an article of food is not, however, universal ; thus. Colonel 

 Irby speaks of the bird as found in Spain : '* Its flesh is not only, like that 

 of the Red-headed and Red-crested Pochards, excellent eating, but far 

 surpasses either in that respect.'^ Even here, in India, Captain Baldwin 

 once wrote : " It is only a tolerable bird for the table.'^ But Mr. F. Finn 

 goes one better than tolerable, and writes in the ' Asian ' : "It is said to be 

 very poor eating, but I have found it to be palatable enough.^' Tastes 

 differ, however, and there mav be others to agree with Messrs. Finn and 

 Baldwin, but personally I have nearly alwavs found them unpalatable in 

 the extreme — fishy, oily, and rank. 



Omnivorous, like all ducks, this species probably makes its diet fully 

 three-quarters animal. Those bird- wliieh I shot in the Diyang and other 

 hill-streams had all (in addition to the caddis-gruljs, dragon-fly larva?, and 

 similar articles) quite a number of small fish, some of them .3 inches in 

 length. These were all, or nearly all, of the small '•Miller's Thumb "^ 

 species, so common in every liill-.-treain. Doubtless these, from their 

 sluggish disposition and their ostrich-like habits of hiding their heads 

 under a stone and then resting in fancied security, fell a very easy prey to 

 the active White-eve, 



On land, this little Pochard is quite out of his element : he can walk 

 all right, and get along well enough for purposes of slow progression, but 

 he is very awkward and shuffling in his movements, and incapable of any 

 appreciable increase in the sjteed of them even under the impulse of fear. 



It is, on the whole, a very silent bird. Hume says that " their quack 

 or note is peculiar, though something like that of the Pochard, a harsh 

 ' koor, kirr, kirr.' with which one soon becomes acquainted, as they 

 invariably utter it ' stuccato ' as they bustle u}i from the rushes, often 

 within a few yards of the boats." 



It is in reference to this bird, and Captain Baldwin^s note on the 

 frequency he has shot it without any feet — not without one only, but 

 without either, — that Hume raises the point as to how their feet have been 

 lost, kc. and says that he himself has killed more than fifty birds thus 

 maimed. Frost-bites he dismisses from the list of probable causes ; and in 

 this most of us will join him. But what, then, is the cause ? Crocodiles 

 would not, as a rule, take a foot at a time ; traps are shown to be verv 

 unlikelv agents ; and one is thrown back on the fish theorv. This is an 



