This Name Is Used, However, For A Variety Of Birds, Among Others The Partridge." - H. C.] The Hind-Toe Is

Absent, the toes are unseparated, recognisable only by the broad flat nails, and fitted below with a callous couch, whilst

The whole foot is covered with short dense feathers like hair, and is more like a quadruped's paw than a bird's foot.

The home of the Syrrhaptes is in the Altai, the Kirghiz Steppes, and the country round Lake Baikal, though it also visits the North of China in great flights. "On plains of grass and sandy deserts," says Gould (Birds of Great Britain, Part IV.), "at one season covered with snow, and at another sun-burnt and parched by drought, it finds a congenial home; in these inhospitable and little-known regions it breeds, and when necessity compels it to do so, wings its way ... over incredible distances to obtain water or food." Hue says, speaking of the bird on the northern frontier of China: "They generally arrive in great flights from the north, especially when much snow has fallen, flying with astonishing rapidity, so that the movement of their wings produces a noise like hail." It is said to be very delicate eating. The bird owes its place in Gould's Birds of Great Britain to the fact - strongly illustrative of its being moult volant, as Polo says it is - that it appeared in England in 1859, and since then, at least up to 1863, continued to arrive annually in pairs or companies in nearly all parts of our island, from Penzance to Caithness.

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