174 THE PINK-HEADED DUCK. 
Sal Forests certainly rare; Major Maurice Tweedie, an ardent 
sportsman, who was for five years stationed in the Kheri district 
(now Lakhimpur) never so much as heard of it. But Mr. Battie 
shows* that even in the West it is not very uncommon in the 
forests, and in the central portions of the Province, though rare, 
it also occurs. From time to time specimens are netted by 
fowlers in the neighbourhood of Lucknow ; and Mr. Geo. Reid 
has himself observed it near Mohunlalganj on the Rai Bareilly 
road during the cold season. In the eastern portions of Oudh 
it is still rare, but appears to be a regular, though scarce, cold 
weather visitant to the jhils of the Fyzabad (where Anderson 
shot it) and Gondah districts. Again it is reported from 
Gorakhpur and Basti and from the Nepal Terai, but in all 
these it is scarce; and as far as I can learn, in all but the 
latter, a cold season visitant only.f It probably occurs in 
Azimgarh and Ghazipur also, as it certainly does in Arrah, 
where Mr. Doyle informs me that he shot one on the 22nd of 
November 1879, at the Bhojpur Jhil, near the Dumraon 
Railway Station. 
Further east in Behar, Purneah, and Maldaht it would seem 
to be a permanent resident, and in special localities in Tirhoot 
and Purneah to be comparatively common. Throughout the 
rest of Lower and Eastern Bengal (except Tipperah and Chitta- 
gong, from whence it has not been reported), it occurs, but is 
everywhere said to be rare. So too both from Sylhet and the 
entire valley of Assam up to Sadiya, (and in Munipur, where 
Damant saw it), it is reported by one correspondent or another, 
but always as a.bird very rarely met with. 
South of the Ganges, as already mentioned, it is occasionally 
found at Arrah, and as Ball tells us, in the Rajmehal hills, near 
Hazaribagh, near Sahibgunge§ on the Ganges, and in Man- 
bhum of Chota Nagpur. 
To the Deccan it is an extremely rare and accidental visitant. 
Neither Davidson nor Wenden ever met with it there, but Fair- 
bank saw it once near Ahmednagar, Colonel McMaster shot 
* [ shot a Pink-headed Duck this year, in May or June, up in the Sal Forests in 
the north of the Kheri District. Another was shot some time afterwards in 
the same jhil and you often see it in pairs in nullahs in the forests. 
‘“T am told by the natives that this bird breeds in the Sal Forests. but I have 
never found its nest. I know for a fact however that it stays down in the forests 
all the year round.” —F. Battie. 
+ But too much stress must not be laid upon this, as the question has not been 
properly worked out, and it may, though rarely, breed in all these as also in Oudh, 
where Irby says that he saw it three times (apparently the only occasions on which he 
met with it) towards the close of the rainy season. 
+ Mr. H. Millett kindly informed me, under date the 2nd of May, that Mr. 
Herbert Reily had then recently ‘‘shot four or five specimens of this Duck in 
the Maldah district ;’ and tnat his brother had also previously shot one 
there. 
§ It is nearly opposite Sahibgunge, in the neighbourhood of Caragola (at the 
south of the Purneah District) that the Pink-headed Duck, to judge from what 
Mr. F. A. Shillingford, Captain W. T. Heaviside, R.E., and others tell me, is 
specially abundant. 
