Note 55 — The Eighteenth New Year’s Feast after the Auspicious Accession

At this time one day on the hunting ground the chief huntsman Imām-wirdī brought before me a partridge that had a spur on one leg and not on the other. As the way to distinguish the female lies in the spur, by way of testing me he asked whether this was a male or a female. I said at once “A female.” When they opened it an egg appeared inside (pīs͟hīna) its belly. The people who were in attendance asked with surprise by what sign I had discovered this: I said that the head and beak of the female are shorter than the male’s. By investigation and often seeing (the birds) I had acquired this dexterity.55 It is a strange thing that the windpipe in all animals (ḥaiwānāt), which the Turks call ḥalq,56 is single from the top of the throat to the crop (chīna-dān), while in the case of the bustard (jarz) it is different. In the bustard it is for four finger-breadths from the top of the throat single and then it divides into two branches and in this form reaches the crop. Also at the place where it divides into two branches there is a stoppage (sar-band) and a knot (girih) is felt by the hand. In the kulang (crane) it is still stranger. In it the windpipe passes in a serpentine manner between the bones of the breast to the rump and then turns back from there and joins the throat. The jarz or charz (bustard) is of two kinds: one is a mottled black and the other būr (a kind of dun colour). I now57 discovered that there are not two kinds, but that which is a mottled black is the male, and that which is dun-coloured is the female. The proof of it is this, that in the piebald there are testicles and in the dun one there are eggs; this has been repeatedly found on examination.