it has been burnt, and when fresh herbage has sprung up on
the burnt portions.
" On two occasions I have shot birds in a wet rice field when
1 was out Snipe shooting—once in the beginning of October, near
Dibrugarh, and another time in February, close under the Naga
hills.
" I have put up no less than four Florican, all females, within
a radius of 30 yards, but have never put up a cock and hen
quite close to each other.
" T h e first time a bird is disturbed, it will rise almost immediately,
but afterwards it becomes very wary, and generally
runs a long distance. I have known birds to lie quite close, and
allow a line of elephants to pass them, and then get up behind
the line. As a rule, birds, when first flushed, always settle within
sight.
" I have shot well grown young birds in December, and that
without putting up others anywhere near them, so I fancy the
young leave the mother before this. All the young that I have
seen have been in female plumage."
Mr. Anley says:—"The real home of the Florican is in the
Bhutan Duars. They are there found in the standing crops of
rice, and when these arc cut, they retreat to the numerous
patches of short fine ooloo grass, from which they derive their
trivial name. In February and March they still keep to the ooloo
grass, but near water, which becomes scarce about this time, and
where the stunted cardamom, of which they are very fond, is found.
" They are very common in the Duars, and a beat through
a patch of ooloo grass, however small, is pretty safe to turn
out at least one. I have seen as many as twenty together of a
morning."
Writing from the Naga hills, Mr. Damant says:—"The Florican
is not found in this district, but I have seen it in the low ground
and chars which lie along the foot of the Garo hills, where it
is common, and where eight or ten may often be bagged in a
morning, but it is rather shy there, and must be stalked on foot. I
have also seen the Florican in the south of Dinagepore and in the
Maldah district, but it is not very abundant in either of these
places.
" I may add that the Florican is unknown in Manipur."
Col. Comber writes :—" The Florican occurs throughout Assam,
but they arc not so plentiful in the upper as in the central and
lower districts, probably owing to there being more forests
and less grass jungle in the former than in the latter.
" In many places they are very common, and ten or more are
killed in a single day.
" The Florican breeds with us, and the young birds begin to
fly about, by the end of August or early in September.
" In the early part of the cold season one sees little of the bird,
but later on they are more easily met with. They then resort
T H E B E N G A L F L O R I C A N. 29
to the Chapori land, and are found in mustard fields, where they
find many insects, especially when the mustard is in flower.
When this is cut, low grass jungle, known in Assam as the
ooloo grass, is their favourite haunt, especially where the^ grass
has been burnt and the young shoots are sprouting freely."
As TO the nidification of this species, I again quote Mr.
Hodgson:—
" The Florican is neither polygamous nor monogamous, nor
migratory nor solitary. These birds dwell permanently and
always breed in the districts they frequent, and they dwell also
socially, but with a rigorous separation of the sexes, such as I
fancy is paralleled in no other species. Four to eight are
always found in the same vicinity, though seldom very close
together, and the males are invariably and entirely apart from
the females after they have grown up. Even in the season of
love, the intercourse of the sexes among adults is quite transitory,
and is conducted without any of that jealousy and pugnacity*
which so eminently distinguish most birds at that period.
" In the season of love, the troops of males and females come
into the same neighbourhood, but without mixing. A male
that is amorously disposed steps forth, and by a variety of very
singular proceedings, quite analogous to human singing and
dancing, recommends himself to the neighbouring bevy of
females. He rises perpendicularly in the air, humming in a
deep peculiar tone and flapping his wings. He lets himself sink
after he has risen some fifteen or twenty yards ; and again he
rises and again falls in the same manner, and with the same
strange utterance, and thus perhaps five or six times, when one
of the females steps forward, and with her he commences a
courtship in the manner of a Turkey cock, by trailing his wings
and raising and spreading his tail, humming all the time as before.
" When thus, with what I must call song and dance, the rites
of Hymen have been duly performed, the male retires to his
company and the female to hers ; nor is there any appearance
(I have at some cost had the birds watched most closely) of
further or more enduring intimacy between the sexes than that
just recorded, nor any evidence that the male ever lends his aid
to the female in the tasks of incubation and of rearing the young.
" The procreative instinct having been satisfied, the female
retires into deep grass cover, and there, at the root of a thick
tuft of grass, with very little semblance of a nest, she deposits
two eggs, never more or less, unless the first be destroyed. If
* Blyth denies this peaceful disposition, and says that not only do the males fight
in captivity, but that an experienced sportsman, who had shot many, assured him
that he had come upon two males fighting desperately and so eagerly that, upon
being disturbed, they renewed their conflict at a short distance, and thus allowed him
to bag both. This has often happened to me where Black Buck were concerned, but
I have never had the luck thus to catch Florican.