110 NETTAPUS COROMANDELIANUS 



enormous quantities for the Calcutta market, it seems to bear persecution remark- 

 ably well. Baker speaks of one place, Moolna Bhil, where one gun could secure 

 forty or fifty pairs in a single day. The fact that very few Indian sportsmen consider 

 them as real game has no doubt tended to lessen the number destroyed. In Hume's 

 day there were probably about twenty thousand taken in a year in the mouths of 

 the Ganges and Brahmaputra. In more recent times it was referred to by Finn (1901) 

 as "almost the commonest duck in India," though in 1909 he remarks that it no 

 longer by any means outnumbers all the other ducks in the Calcutta market. It 

 has never been common in Australia and its status in the East Indies is uncertain. 



Food Value. Very few travelers have waxed enthusiastic over the flesh of the 

 Goose Teal as an article of food, though both Blasius (1884) and Legge (1880), 

 speaking of Borneo and Ceylon respectively, note that it is very good eating. Finn 

 (1915) considers it no better than a common house-pigeon. 



There is a good account of the methods by which the native fishermen of the 

 Sunderbunds net these and other ducks for the Calcutta market, in Baker's "Indian 

 Ducks" (1908). They set up nets fifteen to twenty feet high in some narrow part of 

 the waters to be driven. "Then by night they pole silently up the lake towards the 

 nets, driving the flocks of duck and Teal silently before them, nor is any noise 

 raised until an approach has been made to within some two hundred yards, or even 

 less, of the nets. Thus when the shouts are started many of the flocks have not time 

 to rise high enough to evade the nets into which they fly and are entangled." Goose 

 Teal, because they fly low, fall easy victims to this method of capture. 



Behavior in Captivity. Although Cotton Teal have lived in large aviaries or 

 ponds in India, like the African and Australian species, they will not stand trans- 

 portation, and very few have reached European zoological gardens alive. Mr. 

 Frank Finn sent first examples to London in 1897 and the same year twenty or 

 thirty pairs were imported, at a fancy price, by English dealers. Of this lot nearly 

 all died and Mr. W. Jamrach, one of the importers, observed that they rarely lived 

 more than a month in confinement. Mr. Lee S. Crandall informs me in a letter, 

 February 28, 1917, that the Cotton Teal has been recently acquired by the New 

 York Zoological Garden, the price paid being $24.00 each. A male received in May 

 lived until November and was then killed by accident. Mr. Crandall assures me 

 that the bird was in fine condition when killed, and was just beginning to assume 

 adult plumage. 



Finn (1901) tells of a cage of twelve Goose Teal sent to England, out of which 

 only three survived. Hubbard (1907) calls attention to an affection described as 

 paralytic which she thinks may be analogous to the cramp known in connection 

 with the Paradise Duck (Casarca variegata) from New Zealand. The birds that Finn 



