THE RED-CRESTED POCHARD. 255 
I have never shot them after the 8th of April in the North- 
West Provinces, and further south I believe they have 
mostly left by the third week in March ; but in the submontane 
tracts and in the Lower Himalayas they arrive earlier and linger 
somewhat later. Thus I shot a specimen at Nau-koocha Tal, 
not very far from Nynee Tal, on the 13th of October, and again 
I got one in Kullu, in the stream near Juggut-sukh, on the 3rd 
of May. 
Still, deep, waters are what the Red-crested Pochard loves, 
(though on migration it will halt in any streamlet pool) 
and deep waters in which grow plenty of weeds, It is chiefly, 
therefore, in large lakes and broad rivers at points in their 
course where these are sluggish and plenty of submerged weeds 
srow near the margin that they are to be met with in any 
numbers. A stray bird or pair is, however, occasionally met with 
in apparently most unsuitable localities; and I killed a fine 
solitary male once, in a small masonry tank, barely one 
hundred yards square, just outside the walls of Ajeetmul or 
Oreya, I forget which. 
Habitually they keep in moderate-sized-flocks of from ten to 
thirty, but occasionally on very large pieces of water they are 
seen in thousands, 
Mr. George Reid writes:—“ Never before or since have 
I seen so many of these ducks as I saw one December 
morning on a large jhil in the Fyzabad district. The whole 
surface of the lake was literally one moving mass of these 
lovely ducks.” 
It was early in December, too, that I saw just such a sight on 
an immense broad in the north of the Etawah district. We had 
had a very heavy and late rainy season, and this 7/2/, always 
large, was then immense. All night long, pitched as my tent 
was on a masonry revetted terrace, rising immediately out of 
the water, I had heard fowl coming in; and the next morning, 
before dawn, I was out in my punt, working softly round the 
margin to the western side, so as to have the fowl, when twilight 
broke, against the daylight sky. I soon made out by their cries 
that the mass of the fowl were Pochards, that there were a vast 
number of them, and that a great number of them belonged to 
the present species. Day dawned, and I could soon see a dense 
mass of fowl, but far more distant than I expected, probably fully 
a quarter of a mile off, and much too far to make anything of, 
even with glasses, inthe dim light and through the wavy curtains 
of almost impalpable mist that flickered above the water. Lying 
down I paddled towards them. Very soon a fresh north-east 
wind (and I was heading that way) sprang up against me ; quite 
a sea rose; I was perpetually grounding (a few months later this 
whole side of the lake was one waving sea of wheat), and they 
were swimming away steadily against the wind, so that it was 
bright sunlight before I got within 200 yards, and then I could 
