884 On the Charj, or Otis Bengalensis. [Sept. 



pursue with an energy proportionate to the value of a prize not to be 

 exceeded for the table, especially in March, when it is in highest con- 

 dition. 



Habitat and Range. — The Charj appears to be confined to the Ben- 

 gal Presidency, and to a part only of it, for I find no notice of this species 

 in the Catalogues of Jerdon, of Sykes, or of Franklin, and in fact even in 

 the Gangetic provinces the Charj is nearly limited to the left bank of the 

 Ganges, and there to the districts adjacent to the sub-Himalayas, though 

 I believe it is also found in the somewhat similar districts intervening 

 between south Behar and Nagpur and Midnapur. " Tarai" is an 

 Indian term equivalent to Pays Bas, Landes, Marches, and Marshes, 

 of European tongues ; and the Tarai par excellence is applied to a 

 low lying, moist and rarely redeemed tract of level waste extending, 

 outside the Saul forest, along the base of the sub-Himalayas from the 

 debouche of the Ganges to the Brahmaputra. This tract, of great 

 extent and peculiar features, is the favourite and almost exclusive 

 habitat of the Charj, which avoids the mountains entirely, and almost, 

 if not quite, as entirely, the arid and cultivated plains of the Doab, and 

 of the provinces west of the Jumna, the latter of which are still less 

 suited than the Doab to the Charj' s habits, which prompt it to dwell 

 upon plains indeed and exclusively, but never upon nude or cultivated 

 plains. Shelter of nature's furnishing is indispensable to it, and it 

 solely inhabits wide spreading plains sufficiently elevated to be free from 

 inundation and sufficiently moist to yield a pretty copious crop of 

 grasses, but grasses not so thick nor so high as to impede the move- 

 ments or vision of a well-sized bird that is ever afoot and always 

 sharply on the look out. Such extensive, well-clad, yet uncultivated 

 plains are however to be found only on the left bank of the Ganges, 

 and accordingly I believe that to that bank the Charj is nearly confin- 

 ed, and to the Tarai portion thereof. 



Manners. — The Charj is neither polygamous nor monogamous, nor 

 migratory nor solitary. These birds dwell permanently and always 

 breed in the districts they frequent, and they dwell also socially, but 

 with a rigorous separation of the sexes, such as I fancy no other species 

 could furnish a parallel to. Four to eight are always found in the same 

 vicinity though seldom very close together, and the males are invari- 

 ably and entirely apart from the females, after they have grown up. 



