THE GARGANEY OR BLUE-WINGED TEAL. 219 
crop at one visit. Along the Mekran Coast, and in many places 
along the Sindh and Bombay Coasts, you find them in secluded 
salt-water creeks, where they seem just as much at home as in 
inland waters. : 
They are not very wild or wary ; it is generally easy enough 
to get shots at them with a little precaution ; they are easy to 
work up to in a punt, but they are yet not tame and familiar like 
the Common Teal, and do not, like this, habitually affect pools, 
where men constantly come and go, and in close proximity to 
human habitations. Generally they keep in flocks, rarely less 
than.a dozen are found together, and most commonly from fifty 
to several hundreds are seenina bunch. Few fowl sit closer 
or stragele less, few offer more effective big-gun shots. 
Their flight is rapid, though less so than that of the Common 
Teal, direct and with far fewer sudden turns and twists. They rise 
rapidly and easily from the water, but not very perpendicularly. 
I have so seldom seen them on dry land, that I can speak with 
no certainty about this; but once when emerging from a dense 
reed bed through which I had been carefully creeping in order to 
get a shot at some Shelldrakes that I knew to be paddling 
about somewhere near the margin, I surprised a party of Gar- 
ganeys, all asleep, on a patch of turf some ten yards square, 
almost entirely surrounded by high reeds; they seemed to me 
to rise very clumsily, and I made a tremendous bag with two 
barrels as they flustered up. 
They swim well, far more rapidly when pressed than the 
Common Teal, and dive better. They are altogether, I should 
say, more vzgorous and less agile birds. 
Their food is chiefly vegetable ; tender shoots and leaves of 
water-plants, seeds, bulbs and corms, and slender rhizomes of 
rushes, sedges and the like form the bulk of their diet—to 
which at times large quantities of rice, wild and cultivated, 
‘must be added. Besides this they eat occasionally all kinds of 
insects and their larva, small frogs, worms, fresh-water shells, and 
the like; but,asarule, this forms inland in India, avery small 
proportion of their food, and no traces of anything but vegetable 
‘matter have been observable in the stomachs of many that I 
examined. On the sea coast it is different. There I found 
shrimps, delicate shells, and other animal substances in abun- 
dance in their gizzards, and birds shot in such localities are 
anything but first-rate eating. 
Their call is a harsh quack, very loud for the size of the bird ; 
they are not garrulous, and I have never heard any other note 
from wild birds; but in our tealeries, they chatter, like all the 
other ducks so confined, ina marvellous manner on the least 
disturbance. 
Whether it is only because one habitually meets them in such 
large flocks, or whether is really peculiar to them, I do not know ; 
but certainly one associates the over-head flight of this species 
