THE RUDDY SHELLDRAKE OR BRAHMINY DUCK. 129 
quite exceptional, and in Upper India I should say that they 
may be quite safely eaten, if necessary, without any qualms as 
to their previous diet. 
When better Ducks are procurable, of course, no one would eat 
them, as the flesh is rather hard and dry, and cooked in the ordi- 
nary way, they have a nasty, rank, somewhat fishy taste; but it 
may be useful to mention that if s4zmued before cooking, this taste 
disappears, (it is not in the flesh, but in the skin and fat which 
adheres to this,) and they then form a very tolerable addition 
to a stew. 
Their note is a very clear loud one, of two syllables, which 
Pallas, Elliot, and others represent by the syllables d-oung.* 
It seems with us during the cold season to be only uttered as an 
alarm, or call to vigilance, and is heard not only during the day 
but much more frequently during the night, throughout which 
it resounds at intervals—a very pleasing and inspiriting call to 
my ear, despite its piled-up associations of lost labour and sport 
spoiled. 
Jerdon gives us the classical native legend that the souls of 
erring lovers, who have loved not wisely but too well, pass into the 
forms of these Ducks, condemned thenceforth to pass the night, 
the season of their transgressions, apart, on opposite banks of 
some stream, each ever praying the other for permission to re- 
join them, and each ever compelled sternly to refuse. 
“Chakwa, shall I come?” “Mo Chakwi!” “Chakwi, shall 
I come?’ “ No Chakwa!” 
This story, however, I fear belongs to a more poetical age than 
the present, and I myself have never met with a native in 
Upper India who knew of it except from Europeans. Perhaps 
too the world is more virtuous, or celestial vigilance less keen, for 
certain it is that in these degenerate days, except in the case of 
very narrow rivers like the Hindon in Meerut, alike by day and 
night, Chakwa and Chakwi are to be found both on the same 
side of the water. 
As the pairs seem most tenderly attached to each other, even 
throughout the winter or non-breeding season, one rarely stray- 
ing 100 yards from the other, and both being generally within 
a circle of twenty paces, we may conclude that they pair for life. 
This being so, and they being as we know from captive birds 
anything but quarrelsome, it is difficult to believe that in the 
breeding season the males often fight and even attack Drakes of 
other species. Such, however, Prjevalsky asserts to be the case 
in Mongolia, and I can only suppose that it is the young birds 
who have not yet mated, or chance widowers, who thus seek to 
display their prowess. 
In India, though perhaps natives, like Europeans, have some 
feeling against killing them, owing to their manifest affection for, 
* The Turks call it “ au-gout.”—(Zlwes and Buckley—Ibis, 1870, p. 339-) 
R 
