(homed)-miindl in the N.W. Himalayas ; T. himalayensis, the jer- or cher-mundl of the same region, known also as chikor ■ and Lerwa nevicola, the snow-partridge known in Garhwal as Quoir- or Qur-miindl. Do all these birds behave in such a way as to suggest that miindl may imply the individual isolation related by Jerdon of L. Impeyanus, " In the autumnal and winter months numbers are generally collected in the same quarter of the forest, though often so widely scattered that each bird appears to be alone?" My own search amongst vocabularies of hill-dialects for the meaning of the word has been unsuccessful, spite of the long range tnundls in the Himalayas.
c. Concerning the word chiurtika, chourtka.
Jerdon's entry (ii, 549, 554) of the name chourtka as a synonym of Tetraogallus himalayensis enables me to fill a gap I have left on f. 249 (p.491 and n.6),1 with the name Himalayan snow-cock, and to allow Babur's statement to be that he, in January 1520 AD. when coming down from the Pdd-i-pich pass, saw many snow-cocks. The Memoirs (p.282) has "chikors", which in India is a synonym for kabg-i-dari'; the Memoires (ii, 122) has sauterelles, but this meaning of chiurtika does not suit wintry January. That month would suit for the descent from higher altitudes of snow-cocks. Griffith, a botanist who travelled in Afghanistan dr. 1838ad., saw myriads of cicada between Qilat-i-ghilzai and Ghazni, but the month was July.
d. On the qutdnii. 142, p.324; Memoirs, p. 15 3 ; MemoiresW, 313).
Mr. Erskine for qiitan enters khawasil [gold-finch] which he will have seen interlined in the Elphinstone Codex (f. 109^) in explanation of qutdn.
Shaikh Effendi (Kunos' ed., p. 139) explains qutdn to be the gold-finch, Steiglitz.
Ilminsky's qutdn (p. 17s) is translated by M. de Courteille as pelicane and certainly some copies of the 2nd Persian translation [Muh. Shtrasi's p. 90] have hawasil, pelican.
The pelican would class better than the small finch with the
1 My note 6 on p. 421 shows my earlier difficulties, due to not knowing (when writing it) that kabg-i-dari represents the snow-cock in the Western Himalayas.
