208 THE COMMON TEAL.
pond half or wholly surrounded by houses, in any marshy
corner, on the largest lakes, on the banks of rivers and streams
(,f all sizes, alike those gliding sluggishly through the plains,
and those foaming and spluttering onwards in the hills.
They arc, as a rule, when met with near villages and in
densely populated portions of the country, excessively tame—
too tame to render shooting them possible, unless you really
require them for food. Not only will they let you walk up to
them when they are on a village pond, as close as you please,
but when you have fired at them, and killed two or three,
the remainder, after a short flight, will again settle, as often
as not, still well within shot. Nay, at times, though fluttering
a good deal, and looking about as if astonished, they will not
even rise at all at the first shot, despite the fact of some of their
comrades floating dead before them. More than once I have
seen them deliberately swim up to their departed brethren,
examine them and try to stir them up with their bills, and
apparently then only realize the true state of the case, get really
alarmed and rise, when their efforts proved unavailing.
Hut they are not by any means everywhere or always thus
tame. Where often molested—and I may say generally in out-ofthe
way places, rarely visited by men, and on most large pieces
of water—they rise more readily, and where Teal are plentiful,
there is no prettier sport, (after the larger ducks have been
alarmed and have left,) than shooting round the marshy margins
of some large broad, amongst the rushes of which fully half
the Teal originally there located will still linger, and whence,
as you progress, they will rise in rapid succession usually
well within shot.
On the larger rivers and tanks they are constantly met with in
good-sized flocks, which fly in such dense bunches that a
couple of barrels, well directed, will often secure from a dozen
to twenty birds.
About March they swarm in some rivers, (like the Chambal
near its junction with the Jumna,) and where the banks are
precipitous, so that, having noted where they are, you can
always, by walking a few yards inland, approach them unperccived,
and suddenly appear immediately above them ; they
afford wonderfully pretty shooting. They are at this time
always in pairs, and there are pairs, or groups of pairs, every fifty
or a hundred yards for miles. They rise, when thus startled,
very sharply out of the water, and go off at a great pace.
Even if you miss one of the pair, or as often happens shoot
one of each of two pairs, you are sure to get the other, as they
almost invariably return to the rescue of their fallen mates.
Indeed, as a rule, Teal seem more attached to each other
than any other of the ducks, and this attachment is more
specially conspicuous as the spring broadens into summer. In
the Chambal the difficulty is recovering the dead birds, because
THE COMMON TEAL.
the crocodiles swarm to such a degree that you dare not
send in dogs ; and, though I never heard of their touching men
there, still it is not pleasant to run any such risk, and I used
to keep a boat two or three hundred yards behind, and men
on the bank to watch the birds as they floated, but I lost
many birds thus, snapped up by the crocodiles.
There is no duck so easy to net and snare as Teal ; and
thousands, probably taking the empire as a whole, hundreds of
thousands, are yearly captured and sold. Indeed, but for these
Teal and Quail, we should many of us fare but poorly during
the hot season and early part of the rains in the plains of India.
Tealeries are amongst the greatest of our luxuries, as all
who have enjoyed them in out-of-the-way places where butcher's
meat was an impossiblity in the hot weather, will, I am
sure, allow ; and it may be well to say a few words about their
construction and management.
Fresh water, and plenty of it, is the first requisite, and to
ensure this, the tealery should always be located near the well,
and every drop of water drawn thence for irrigating the garden
made to pass through it. The site should be, if possible, under
some large umbrageous tree, such as we so commonly find
near garden wells, and to the east of the trunk, so that the
building may be completely protected from the noontide and
afternoon sun. You first make a small shallow masonry tank,
—twelve feet by eight and ten inches in depth is amply large.
Four feet distant from this all round you build a thick mud wall
to a height of three feet above the interior. The whole interior
surface of this wall and the flat space* between it and the
tank must be lined with pukha masonry, and finished off with
well-worked chunam. The great points to be aimed at are to
have the whole lower parts so finished off as to be on the one
hand impregnable to rats, ichneumons, and snakes ; on the other
to present no crevice in which dirt, ticks, and other insects can
lurk. Outside, the walls must be quite smooth, so that no
snakes can crawl up them. On the wall you build stout
square pillars, four feet high, on which you place a thick pent
thatch roof. At the spring of the roof you stretch Inside a thin,
rather loose, ceiling-cloth to prevent the birds hurting their
heads when they start up suddenly, as they will, at first, on any
alarm, and especially when the sweeper goes in to wash out
the place. The interspaces between the pillars you fill in with
well-made cross-work {jaffri) of split bamboo, except one of
them in which you place a door of similar work made with
slips of wood. You must arrange that all the water both
enters and leaves the building through gratings impervious to
snakes and the like marauders. Two or three feet outside the
walls run a little groove, a ditchlet, in which plant, early in the
* This should have a slope of about half an inch in the foot, towards the tank.
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