112 THE WHISTLING TEAL. 
killed her outright. But the strangest part of the business 
was, that the villagers assured me that this nest was the Crow’s 
own nest, and that they /ent zt every year after their young 
had flown to the Whistling Teal. I should have verified this 
the next spring, but left the Mynpooree District and never 
again had the chance of revisiting the spot. 
“Where the Whistling Teal lives in moderate-sized tanks, and 
where it is tame and fearless, it feeds, I believe, almost exclusively 
in the water and during the day, chiefly in the fore and afternoons, 
resting in trees during the middle of the day and roosting on 
these at night. I have continually seen them going up to roost 
about sunset, alighting first on the outside twigs of some large 
branch, and presently sidling up well inside the tree and nearer to 
the trunk. But where they are wilder, and where they frequent 
rivers, they feed at night like other Ducks, and may be seen 
about sunset leaving the river in large flocks to feed in the 
neighbouring paddy fields and swamps. 
They are chiefly, I think, vegetarians, and devour rice espe- 
cially, wild and cultivated, most greedily, but they also feed 
on all kinds of seeds, rushes and other water plants, and on 
the herbage, bulbs and corms of these and on grass, and at 
times, small shells, worms and a variety of insects are found 
in their stomachs. Once I shot one that disgorged, as it fell, 
atiny silvery fish about two inches in length. But, asa rule, 
(and I have dissected many), they feed principally, I believe, on 
vegetable substances, and I am therefore at a loss to account 
for the peculiar, faint, half-muddy, half-fishy taste, that their 
flesh always seems to have, and which, to me, makes them 
unpalatable even when disguised with sauces in a stew. 
Their call is a double hissing whistled note, uttered always 
when they are alarmed, or when they are about to fly, and 
often repeated during flight, but more seldom heard when 
they are at rest and at their ease, either on the water or on trees. 
Only when the female is sitting inside a hole where the male 
cannot see her, the pair keep up a pretty continuous conversation. 
OF FEW SPECIES does the nidification vary so much according 
to local circumstances as that of our present bird. 
In one place it lays almost exclusively in stick nests, (of its 
own building, or else old ones of Crows, Cormorants or Paddy 
Birds slightly furbished up), fairly high up on large trees ; in 
another in hollows between the huge branches of ancient trees, 
such asa Wood Owl would use, or deep in holes in the trunks 
of these, such as a Nukhta would select. In other places it nests 
on low palms, small thorny bushes, or dense clumps of bul- 
rush and reeds, or again on the ground in thick grass or on the 
water on floating patches of tangled water weeds. 
The laying season also varies in most places from the 
middle of June until quite the middle of October, but in 
