50 THE LARGE OR BLACK-BELLIED SAND-GROUSE. 



circling flight and settling pretty nearly at the spot they rose 

 from. You will also, especially if it is late in the season and the 

 morning young, observe, as a rule, a vast amount of skirmishing 

 going on between the males ; not regular fights, but a series 

 of pecks delivered, and perhaps a little hustle. I watched a 

 large flock once from a distance of perhaps a hundred yards 

 from behind a sand hill, and it seemed to me that no two 

 males came within a foot of each other without coming to blows 

 in a mild way. 



Every one in India knows the peculiar clucking note of this 

 and the Common Sand-Grouse, but I really do not know how to 

 put it on paper. 



As to food, I have been often assured that they eat insects 

 freely. I can only say that I have examined the stomachs of 

 scores without ever finding anything in them beyond small 

 seeds and grains of various kinds and little pieces of grass and 

 herbs. On one or two occasions I have, no doubt, seen a 

 single ant or tiny beetle, but these were, I believe, picked up 

 by accident along with some seed or other and swallowed 

 involuntarily. There are always, or almost always, small stones, 

 usually quartz pebbles, in the stomach • sometimes only one 

 or two, sometimes a great number. 



As I have already said, I do not think that the Large Sand- 

 Grouse breeds with us, but it may do so on some of the moder- 

 ately elevated plateaux of Kabul or Khelat, and it certainly 

 breeds on the Persian plateau, at from four to seven thousand 

 feet elevation, and at similar altitudes in Western Turkestan. 

 Further west it seems to breed in all the countries already 

 referred to in defining its range. 



It lays, probably early in June, three eggs (as exustus does) 

 in some slight depression in the soil. The eggs, Tristram says, 

 are placed two in a line, and one outside them, but I doubt whe- 

 ther there can be any invariable rule on this point, as I have 

 found those of exustus in all kinds of positions. Of the eggs, 

 Dresser says : — " In shape they are oval, rather elongated, taper- 

 ing equally towards each end, and in colour are light stone-colour 

 or buff, more or less marbled with very indistinct purplish grey 

 under-lying shell-markings and light brown over-lying surface 

 blotches, which latter in some specimens are drawn in fantas- 

 tical shapes ; and in most of the eggs the dark markings are 

 more or less collected round one end. In size they vary from 

 1*85 by i'3 to 2 inches by r35." 



No doubt they are elongated, cylindrical eggs, varying much 

 in ground colour and in the amount and intensity of markings. 

 One I saw, collected I believe by Dr Tristram, had a dull, pale 

 fawn coloured ground, and was profusely mottled and blotched 

 with two shades of a pale somewhat rufous brown and purplish 

 dusky. 



