212 THE COMMON TEAL, 
feeding places are always the swampy margins and weedy 
shallows of broads or sluggish streams. There they feed on 
wild rice, grasses of all kinds, and their seeds, and all sorts of 
tender shoots, roots, corms and bulbs, as well as insects and 
their larve, tiny shells and worms. But this animal food 
forms but a small proportion of their diet here ; indeed no traces 
of it have been visible in numbers that I have examined, and 
in captivity they thrive @ ne pouvoir plus without it, (which 
some of the larger ducks do not), and sol am inclined to grade 
them as essentially vegetarians. 
They never dive for food of course, but they in no way disdain 
the orthodox Mallard upside-down position, and a whole flock 
will suddenly exhibit to you the reverses of their shields with 
a want of delicacy that must be truly shocking to those trans- 
atlantic sisters of ours who put trousers on to piano legs. 
The ordinary day call of the Teal is a weak, rather shrill 
quack, but they have occasionally another note, a distinct 
whistle, uttered some say only by the male. ‘This is the note 
most heard at nights, and it is then apt to be confounded with 
similar calls of Plovers and other water birds; and I have never 
myself been quite sure of it, though their quack I can tell at 
any time. 
The wild Teal is almost always better than any other duck 
for the table except Mallard ; but the carefully fed and tended 
captive Teal is, when rightly cuisined (more than mere cooking 
is required) the xe plus ultra of comestibles. 
NO RECORD exists of the Common Teal breeding within 
our limits, but it breeds generally in suitably secluded spots 
in Europe and Asia throughout the temperate “zone 
north of the 4oth Degree N. Latitude, and I should not be at all 
surprised if it bred with us in Kashmir just as the Mallard does. 
Not only there, but in a small lake not far from Hanle, 1 
have known Teal killed in June and July. 
Yarrell says:—“ The Teal breeds in the long rushy herbage 
about the edges of lakes, or in the boggy parts of the upland 
moors. Its nest is formed of a large mass of decayed 
vegetable matter, with a lining of down and feathers, upon 
which eight or ten eggs rest.” 
Mr. Richard Dann wrote :—‘“It breeds all over Lapland, 
both Western and Eastern, and is very abundant in the Dofre 
Fiel, within the range of the birch trees. The eggs vary in 
number from ten to fifteen. It breeds also in the cultivated 
districts in all the mosses and bogs.” 
Dresser says that in Northern Finland he has repeatedly 
taken the nests “which he found on the ground amongst the 
grass, oftenest under some low bush, which served to conceal 
it, and sometimes at a considerable distance from the water.” 
