[Passing through Ch’ang-k’ou, Mr. Rockhill found the people praying for rain.  “The people told me,” he says, in his Journey (p. 9), “that they knew long ago the year would be disastrous, for the sand grouse had been more numerous of late than for years, and the saying goes Sha-ch’i kuo, mai lao-po, ‘when the sand grouse fly by, wives will be for sale.’”—­H.  C.]

The chief difficulty in identification with the Syrrhaptes or any known bird, would be “the feet like a parrot’s.”  The feet of the Syrrhaptes are not indeed like a parrot’s, though its awkward, slow, and waddling gait on the ground, may have suggested the comparison; and though it has very odd and anomalous feet, a circumstance which the Chinese indicate in another way by calling the bird (according to Hue) Lung Kio, or “Dragon-foot.” [Mr. Rockhill (Journey) writes in a note (p. 9):  “I, for my part, never heard any other name than sha-ch’i, ‘sand-fowl,’ given them.  This name is used, however, for a variety of birds, among others the partridge.”—­H.  C.] The hind-toe is absent, the toes are unseparated, recognisable only by the broad flat nails, and fitted below with a callous couch, whilst the whole foot is covered with short dense feathers like hair, and is more like a quadruped’s paw than a bird’s foot.

The home of the Syrrhaptes is in the Altai, the Kirghiz Steppes, and the country round Lake Baikal, though it also visits the North of China in great flights.  “On plains of grass and sandy deserts,” says Gould (Birds of Great Britain, Part IV.), “at one season covered with snow, and at another sun-burnt and parched by drought, it finds a congenial home; in these inhospitable and little-known regions it breeds, and when necessity compels it to do so, wings its way ... over incredible distances to obtain water or food.”  Hue says, speaking of the bird on the northern frontier of China:  “They generally arrive in great flights from the north, especially when much snow has fallen, flying with astonishing rapidity, so that the movement of their wings produces a noise like hail.”  It is said to be very delicate eating.  The bird owes its place in Gould’s Birds of Great Britain to the fact—­strongly illustrative of its being moult volant, as Polo says it is—­that it appeared in England in 1859, and since then, at least up to 1863, continued to arrive annually in pairs or companies in nearly all parts of our island, from Penzance to Caithness.  And Gould states that it was breeding in the Danish islands.  A full account by Mr. A. Newton of this remarkable immigration is contained in the Ibis for April, 1864, and many details in Stevenson’s Birds of Norfolk, I. 376 seqq.  There are plates of Syrrhaptes in Radde’s Reisen im Sueden von Ost-Sibirien, Bd.  II.; in vol. v. of Temminck, Planches Coloriees, Pl. 95; in Gould, as above; in Gray, Genera of Birds, vol. iii. p. 517 (life size); and in the Ibis for April, 1860.  From the last our cut is taken.