Two species of jacana occur in India:  the bronze-winged (Motopus indicus) and the pheasant-tailed jacana or the water-pheasant (Hydrophasianus chirurgus).  They are to be found on most tanks in the well-watered parts of the United Provinces.  They occur in small flocks and are often put up by sportsmen when shooting duck.  They emit weird mewing cries.  The bronze-winged jacana is a black bird with bronze wings.  It is about the size of a pigeon, but has much longer legs.  The pheasant-tailed species is a black-and-white bird.  In winter the tail is short, but in May both sexes grow long pheasant-like caudal feathers which give the bird its popular name.  The bronze-winged jacana does not grow these long tail feathers.

The nests of jacanas are truly wonderful structures.  They are just floating pads of rushes and leaves of aquatic plants.  Sometimes practically the whole of the pad is under water, so that the eggs appear to be resting on the surface of the tank.  The nest of the bronze-winged species is usually larger and more massive than that of the water-pheasant.  The latter’s nest is sometimes so small as hardly to be able to contain the eggs—­a little, shallow, circular cup of rushes and water-weeds or floating lotus leaves or tufts of water-grass.  The eggs of the two species show but little similarity.  Both, however, are very beautiful and remarkable.  The eggs of the bronze-winged jacana have a rich brownish-bronze background, on which black lines are scribbled in inextricable confusion, so that the egg looks as though Arabic texts had been scrawled over it.  This species might well be called “the Arabic writing-master.”  The eggs of the water-pheasant are in shape like pegtops without the peg.  They are of a dark rich green-bronze colour, and devoid of any markings.

The nest of the handsome, but noisy, purple coot (Porphyrio poliocephalus) is a platform of rushes and reeds which is sometimes placed on the ground in a rice field, but is more often floating, and is then tethered to a tree or some other object.  From six to ten eggs are laid.  These are very beautiful objects.  The ground colour is delicate pink.  This is spotted and blotched with crimson; beneath these spots there are clouds of pale purple which have the appearance of lying beneath the surface of the shell.

The white-breasted water-hen (Gallinula phoenicura) is a bird that must be familiar to all.  One pair, at least, is to be found in every village which boasts of a tank and a bamboo clump, no matter how small these be.  The water-hen is a black bird about the size of the average bazaar fowl, with a white face, throat and breast.  It carries its short tail almost erect, and under this is a patch of brick-red feathers.  During most seasons of the year it is a silent bird, but from mid-May until the end of the monsoon it is exceedingly noisy, and, were it in the habit of haunting our gardens and compounds, its cries