GAME BIRDS of British India have been in a brief manner noticed under the heading Birds of India, and the more important will be found under their respective titles in more detail. They have been well described in a monograph by Mr. A. O. Hume, C.B. Game birds, elephants, and other wild animals are supposed to be rapidly diminishing in numbers, and a close season for elephants has been appointed. To check the indiscriminate persecution, and tO give the small game fair play, Poona sportsmen proposed, that between the 1st June and 15th October partridges and quail be considered out of season, and that sportsmen aareeing to this proposition shall use their utmose exertions to prevent the sale and destruction of these varieties of game between the periods mentioned. The black or painted partridge—an excellent bird for sport or for the table, and once common throughout the Dekhan—is fa,st becoming extinct in all but the remote parts of the country. Small game in India is assailed by innumerable natural enemies ; snakes, rats, bandicoots, ichneumons, foxes, and jackals all prey upon the eggs or the young game on the ground, while kites, buzzards, hawks, owls, and many other birds assail them in the air with a persistency that renders it surprising that game should be as abundant as it is in places where the native shikaris have no interest in destroying it by wholesale ; but the latter are in fact its worst enemies, a single shikari family, accustomed to supply a market, doing probably more damage in a month than all its other enemies put together could inflict upon it in a year. They
are adepts at netting and snaring, and they have calls for every kind of game bird, by which they take thousands in the breeding season, and effectually put a stop to its reproduction. Migratory birds fare better than the others ; they too are persecuted in a manner which is causing them to becotne scarcer and scarcer every year. Hardly has the first veisp of snipe made an appearance within marketable distance of a town or cantontnent, than the birds are either netted by native shikaris, or shot down by sportsmen ! An October snipe is scarcely worth eating, yet, for the sake of slaying or selling him, hundreds of birds are driven harassed from haunts, where, had they been allowed to remain in peace until later in the year, they would not only have fattened to perfection, but would have attracted other hundreds to their feeding grounds to afford good sport to the sportsman. As with snipe so with wild ducks. It is hard to conceive the latter out of date in India, considering the immense flocks in which they visit us, but they are nevertheless needlessly persecuted by shikaris and others without regard to season ; and good duck - shooting is no longer to be had in the vicinity of any large town or cantonment, or anywhere, we might say, within easy distance of a line of rail.