208 THE COMMON TEAL. 
pond half or wholly surrounded by houses, in any marshy 
corner, on the largest lakes, on the banks of rivers and streams 
of all sizes, alike those gliding sluggishly through the plains, 
and those foaming and spluttering onwards in the hills. 
They are,asa rule, when met with near villages and in 
densely populated portions of the country, excessively tame— 
too tame to render shooting them possible, unless you really 
require them for food. Not only will they let you walk up to 
them when they are ona village pond, as close as you please, 
but when you have fired at them, and killed two or three, 
the remainder, after a short flight, will again settle, as often 
as not, still well within shot. Nay, at times, though fluttering 
a good deal, and looking about as if astonished, they will not 
even rise at all at the first shot, despite the fact of some of their 
comrades floating dead before them. More than once I have 
seen them deliberately swim up to their departed brethren, 
examine them and try to stir them up with their bills, and 
apparently then only realize the true state of the case, get really 
alarmed and rise, when their efforts proved unavailing. 
But they are not by any means everywhere or always thus 
tame. Where often molested—and I may say generally in out-of- 
the-way places, rarely visited by men, and on most large pieces 
of water—they rise more readily, and where Tealare plentiful, 
there is no prettier sport, (after the larger ducks have been 
alarmed and have left,) than shooting round the marshy margins 
of some large broad, amongst the rushes of which fully half 
the Teal originally there located will still linger, and whence, 
as you progress, they will rise in rapid succession usually 
well within shot. 
On the larger rivers and tanks they are constantly met with in 
good-sized flocks, which fly in such dense bunches that a 
couple of barrels, well directed, will often secure from a dozen 
to twenty birds. 
About March they swarm in some rivers, (like the Chambal 
near its junction with the Jumna,) and where the banks are 
precipitous, so that, having noted where they are, you can 
always, by walking a few yards inland, approach them unper- 
ceived, and suddenly appear immediately above them; they 
afford wonderfully pretty shooting. They are at this time 
always in pairs, and there are pairs, or groups of pairs, every fifty 
or a hundred yards for miles. They rise, when thus startled, 
very sharply out of the water, and go off at a great pace. 
Even if you miss one of the pair, or as often happens shoot 
one of each of two pairs, you are sure to get the other, as they 
almost invariably return to the rescue of their fallen mates. 
Indeed, as a rule, Teal seem more attached to each other 
than any other of the ducks, and this attachment is more 
specially conspicuous as the spring broadens into summer. In 
the Chambal the difficulty is recovering the dead birds, because 
