would attract as much attention as do those of the koel and the brain-fever bird.  As, however, water-hens are confined to tiny hamlets situated far away from cities, many people are not acquainted with their calls, which “Eha” describes as “roars, hiccups and cackles.”  The nest is built in a bamboo clump or other dense thicket.  The eggs are stone-coloured, with spots of brown, red and purple.  The young birds, when first hatched, are covered with black down, and look like little black ducklings.  They can run, swim and dive as soon as they leave the egg.  Little parties of them are to be seen at the edge of most village tanks in August.

The resident ducks are all busy with their nests.  The majority of them lay their eggs in July, so that in August they are occupied with their young.

The cotton-teal (Nettopus coromandelianus) usually lays its eggs in a hole in a mango or other tree.  The hollow is sometimes lined with feathers and twigs.  It is not very high up as a rule, from six to twelve feet above the ground being the usual level.  The tree selected for the nesting site is not necessarily close to water.  Thirteen or fourteen eggs seem to be the usual clutch, but as many as twenty-two have been taken from one nest.  Young teal, when they emerge from the egg, can swim and walk, but they are unable to fly.  No European seems to have actually observed the process whereby they get from the nest to the ground or the water.  It is generally believed that the parent birds carry them.  Mr. Stuart Baker writes that a very intelligent native once told him that, early one morning, before it was light, he was fishing in a tank, when he saw a bird flutter heavily into the water from a tree in front of him and some twenty paces distant.  The bird returned to the tree, and again, with much beating of the wings, fluttered down to the surface of the tank; this performance was repeated again and again at intervals of some minutes.  At first the native could only make out that the cause of the commotion was a bird of some kind, but after a few minutes, he, remaining crouched among the reeds and bushes, saw distinctly that it was a cotton-teal, and that each time it flopped into the water and rose again it left a gosling behind it.  The young ones were carried somehow in the feet, but the parent bird seemed to find the carriage of its offspring no easy matter; it flew with difficulty, and fell into the water with considerable force.

August is the month in which some fortunate observer will one year be able to confirm or refute this story.

The comb-duck or nukta (Sarcidiornis melanotus), which looks more like a freak of some domesticated breed than one of nature’s own creatures, makes, in July or August, a nest of grass and sticks in a hole in a tree or in the fork of a stout branch.  Sometimes disused nests of other species are utilised.  About a dozen eggs is the usual number of the clutch, but Anderson once found a nest containing no fewer than forty eggs.