12 THE SNOW-WREATH OR SIBERIAN CRANE, 
It is said to have been seen near St. Petersburg and in one 
or two other localities in Central Russia, and Colonel Drum- 
mond Hay observed it once in Macedonia.* 
AS A RULE, the Snow-Wreath does not, I think, put in an 
appearance even in the Sub-Himalayan tracts before the middle 
of October, and they are at least a week later further south, as 
at Etawah, but in 1879 one was shot somewhere near Kurnal 
on the 3rd, and Mr. W. Forsyth notes having seen a large flock 
at Dehree-on-Soane on the 6th of October. 
The distribution of this species in India must be, to a great 
extent, governed by its peculiar habits. It affects only good 
sized sheets of water, large portions of which are shallow, and 
which contain a considerable growth of the rushes and aquatic 
plants on which it seems to feed exclusively. Necessarily, there- 
fore, the localities in which it can occur in India, and especially 
in Northern and North-Western India, (and we have no reason 
to suppose that it ever goes far south,) are comparatively limited 
in number ; and, though I can name a good many tracts of coun- 
try which are yearly visited by small flocks or parties, still, taking 
Upper India as a whole, they are excessively rare birds, and I 
should greatly doubt as many even as five thousand birds of 
this species yearly visiting India Proper. We gather that during 
the summer they are more or less abundant over incredibly 
vast tracts of Northern Asia, and it is pretty certain that they 
do not winter in Turkestan, Kashgar, or Tibet, but only a very 
small portion of those that migrate from the north can be 
accounted for in India, and it seems to me probable that they 
will prove to go further east, and that when we know more of 
the fauna of these tracts, we shall find that they occur in 
Assam, Yunan, the Shan States, Independent Burma, &c., 
wherever broads and lakes suited to their peculiar habits exist. 
No plate, that has ever been given of this species, does any 
justice to its extreme elegance of form, or to the dense, snowy, 
Swan-like character of its plumage. To judge by the pictures, 
Gould’s, Dresser’s, our own, the bird appears a gaunt, gawky, 
ill-proportioned creature, whereas, in reality, it is the lily of 
birds, and stand in what position it may, the entire outline of 
its form presents a series of the most graceful and harmoni- 
ous curves, 
No one else appears ever to have watched these birds care- 
fully, or to have recorded anything about their habits, haunts, 
or food, and I myself have seen but little of them for the last 
ten years, so that I am constrained to reproduce, with a few ver- 
bal alterations, the account I published of this species in the 
Lois for 1868. : 
* Tis, J870; Pp: 333: 
