THE TEAL Querquedula crecca Arabic, Sharshare

Head and neck chestnut-brown; a patch of green encircles the eyes and cheeks, a light buff streak divides the green from the brown; neck, back, and flanks grey, composed of delicate alternate black and white wavy lines. Scapulars white with rich black on their outer webs; green metallic bar on wing; under-parts white; breast spotted with buffish-black; under-tail coverts a clear, brilliant yellow-buff; beak and legs black; eyes brown. The female looks smaller than the male, and is a sober-coloured brown bird, with darker, almost black, markings. Length, 15·5 inches.

AS far as my own experience goes, I have never seen any really large flock of duck, of whatever kind, but there have been Teal among them. I do not care to say that I think this is the very commonest of all the duck tribe. It is certainly met with very frequently, but Captain Shelley holds that it is absolutely “the most abundant species of water-fowl throughout Egypt,” and possibly he is right. It is the same smart little bird we have at home, and the male has, when showing off, a most attractive appearance, of which it is fully aware, as is shown by its jaunty carriage. Of all duck, this is the quickest off the mark; how it does it one can hardly see, but it leaves the water in one second, apparently at top speed, as if it had been going for some minutes. As with the Shoveller this duck comes in great numbers to the Cairo Zoological Gardens, and the ready intelligence it shows in remaining in full sight of men and flying close over their heads whilst in the Gardens, and the wary care it shows the moment it is outside the sanctuary, is most interesting. On wall-paintings I am told it is depicted, but I am not certain that I have ever seen its small form shown; in the matter of relative size of living and other objects, these old craftsmen were curiously capricious. A notable illustration of this is in the way they portrayed the wives of the heroic Rameses statues, where you will find the lady shown coming up only to the knee-joint of her gigantic lord and master. When they treated royal ladies in this way, it is useless to expect great accuracy in the matter of rendering the various relative sizes of humble water-fowl! Teal may be seen in nearly all the winter months amongst the Coot at the Sacred Lake at Karnak, and at many other places guarded by the Antiquities Department. Mr. Nicoll writes: “Several hundred Teal winter on the lake in the Gardens (Zoological). In some years a few of them arrive as early as the latter part of August, and they have been known to stay as late as the 8th of May.”