104. THE COTTON TEAL. 
all is peace, and when warring men and dogs appear “ zx penetra- 
lia hostes,’ in the winter and during the breeding season, in the 
finest and the wettest weather, I have found them both noisy 
and silent. No doubt, as a rule, they always chuckle inces- 
santly as they fly about after having been disturbed, but yet, at 
times, I have noticed party after party swish by without uttering 
a sound. When quite undisturbed, they are more commonly 
silent, or at most call only occasionally, but I have watched 
parties, which nothing whatsoever was meddling with or threat- 
ening, and which were yet chattering with one consent, like ladies 
at a tea-fight. 
During the cold season and spring where at all numerous 
they are commonly seen in flocks of from ten to thirty ; in the 
breeding season (though there may be fifty about the same 
pond) they always keep distinctly in pairs, and during the latter 
portion of the summer and autumn they are in families which 
do not, I think, coalesce into flocks before the middle of Novem- 
ber, or even later. 
Though they rise rather awkwardly, they fly, as already 
noticed, with great rapidity and ease, turning and twisting with 
a facility unequalled, I think, by any of our other Water Fowl. I 
have seen Peregrines (wild and tame) strike almost every kind 
of Duck and ‘Leal that we get commonly in Upper India, but I 
never saw one get the better of a Cotton Teal. More than once 
I have seen these Falcons swoop at them, under conditions which 
would have ensured the capture of even a Common Teal (and 
these are pretty sharp flyers also); but the little Girri, twisted out 
of the way, as easily as an unwearied Hare from before a Grey- 
hound, and long before the Peregrine could recover itself, was 
down on and wzder the water. 
They swim pretty rapidly, though rather jerkily, but they dive 
like Dab-Chicks. On land they seldom venture, though I have 
seen them occasionally feeding or resting on small grassy islands; 
but, as Blyth long ago remarked, they cannot wa/f at all, they 
only wabble along, shuffling as if their bodies were too heavy for 
their legs, yet when on trees—and it is on these that they pass 
almost the whole of their time not spent on the water or on the 
wing—they stand firm enough, and betray no weakness in the 
lower extremities. 
They feed chiefly during the hours of daylight, sleeping 
usually on trees, where I have repeatedly seen them go to roost 
about dusk, but on bright moonlight nights I have occasionally 
seen them in the water with other Wild Fowl. 
Their food consists of rice grains, especially the seed of the 
wild rice known as “ Pasaze’ in Upper India, and of the shoots 
of various kinds of aquatic plants, worms, water insects, and 
their larvae. Once or twice I have found what I believed to be 
the remains of minute fishes and fresh-water crustaceans in 
their stomachs, but of this I could not be quite certain, 
