110 THE WHISTLING TEAL. 
pond (perhaps one introduced there), but the rest of his speci- 
mens came from the Terai, and Scully did not observe it in 
Nepal. 
It is not, I think, a hill bird, and nowhere, I believe, ascends 
the hills to any considerable elevation. Fairbank observed it 
at Mahableshwar, but it has not been noticed at Abu or Ooty, 
or on the Pulneys. 
Outside our limits it occurs in Independent Burma and 
Siam, throughout the Malay Peninsula, in Sumatra, Java, and 
Borneo. A specimen, said to differ only from this species in 
the length of the tarsus, is in the British Museum, brought by 
Clapperton and Denham, from Lake Tchad in Central Africa, 
but Iam not prepared, without further information, to accept 
this latter as a habitat of the present species. 
THE WHISTLING TEAL is essentially a tree Duck; it must 
have trees as well as water, and hence its entire absence from 
some pieces of water, in treeless parts of Rajputana for instance, 
where other species of Ducks abound during the cold season. 
Generally it is more common in well-wooded than in compa- 
ratively bare, open country. Yet it prefers level or fairly level 
tracts to very broken hilly country, and again, though in some 
places, e.g., at Tavoy, it may be met with in rivers in enormous 
flocks, it, as a rule, prefers moderate-sized lakes and ponds to 
rivers. 
Owing to these preferences, there are many tracts, as for 
instance, portions of the Deccan, where it is extremely rare. 
In the Southern Konkan it is almost unknown. Mr. Vidal tells 
me that he has only once seen it in the Ratnagiri District, and 
that was in February on the Washishti River near Chiplun. 
I have already alluded to its migratory habits. I may add 
that it seems to be altogether a permanent resident only in 
well-watered, well-wooded, and well-drained, districts ; in the 
drier districts the majority are only monsoon visitants; in the 
more swampy tracts the majority come only for the dry season. 
But although the majority gad about like fashionable folks; 
spending one season here and the other there, a few seem to be 
everywhere (except in the western portions of the range of the 
species), truly permanent residents. Of course this must depend 
upon the supply of food available, but we know too little as yet 
of the details of such matters to be able to trace this partial 
migration to its exact causes. 
It is about weedy tanks and swamps that one mostly meets 
with the Whistling Teal, in pairs during the breeding season, but 
in flocks of from twenty to two thousand (according to the size 
of the swamp or broad which they inhabit), during the cold 
season and spring. Like the Cotton Teal—and both species are 
commonly seen in the same tanks—they are very tame and 
familiar birds, frequenting village ponds, and living on the trees 
