seemingly for variation, it may, after the same preliminary notes, burst 
forth with a rapid, ringing, "Ke-titur, Ke-titur, Ke-titur" of equally 
long duration. If the female is near she cooperates with a single, 
sharp, high note uttered in between the "Ke-titur" notes of the male. 
Either call of the male may well carry a half-mile on a still day. 
Birds call in every season and at all hours, though more fre- 
quently mornings and evenings. It is by no means unusual to hear three 
or more calling sometimes almost simultaneously from different parts of 
the same scrub. Hume (26) well expressed the feeling of all who know 
this bird in its native range when he wrote, "Its clear, ringing, in- 
spiring call, once heard, is never forgotten, In upper India these far 
piercing notes are so inseparably connected with our camp life and all 
its delights, that, even in the dismal lanes of Calcutta, the cry of a 
caged bird sends a thrill through one and one seems to breathe again the 
pure air of the Northwest, heavy with scent of the Mango bloom and to 
forget for an instant, the squalid surroundings of the fetid metropolis." 
Interbreeding 
Subspecies certainly cross where their ranges overlap. Yet, even 
where black and gray francolins share, to a considerable degree, the same 
habitat, no interbreeding has been reported nor observed. The same 
apparently is true when these species are kept together in captivity. 
Predation 
Gray francolins are wide awake, quick-dodging, scurrying birds. 
As such they would seem to be less subject to losses from winged or 
ground predators than are black francolins. We found only one mention 
of loss in the literature. Dharmakumarsinhji (14) reports that not less 
than a half dozen partridges (gray francolins) were robbed of their 
young in one summer by jungle crows (Corvus macrorhynchos). Nor were 
our observations much more productive. Bohl found where one female had 
been caught on the nest. In a second case, the eggs were destroyed when 
the farmer irrigated his field and flooded out the nest. 
The general situation, as regards predation with both species of 
francolin, is summed up on page 34, 
In many districts one of the most important predators is man. Vast 
numbers of these birds are shot for sport or netted for sale in the local 
markets. Yet so adaptable and productive are they, that we did not find 
a single large district from which these birds have been extirpated by 
these means though their numbers have been locally very much reduced. 
One reason for this is that trappers were loath to work more than a 
dozen miles from their villages, beyond which the francolin were often 
not much disturbed by the Indian methods of hunting. 
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