Besides L. Impeyanus and Trapagon Ceriornis satyra which Yule mentions as called “moonaul”, there are L. refulgens, mūnāl and Ghūr (mountain)-mūnāl; Trapagon Ceriornis satyra, called mūnāl in Nipāl; T. C. melanocephalus, called sing (horned)-mūnāl in the N.W. Himālayas; T. himālayensis, the jer- or cher-mūnāl of the same region, known also as chikor; and Lerwa nevicola, the snow-partridge known in Garhwal as Quoir- or Qūr-mūnāl. Do all these birds behave in such a way as to suggest that mūnāl 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 mūnāls in the Himālayas.
c. Concerning the word chīūrtika, chourtka.
Jerdon’s entry (ii, 549, 554) of the name chourtka as a synonym of Tetraogallus himālayensis enables me to fill a gap I have left on f. 249 (p. 491 and n. 6),[2810] with the name Himālayan snow-cock, and to allow Bābur’s statement to be that he, in January 1520 AD. when coming down from the Bād-i-pīch pass, saw many snow-cocks. The Memoirs (p.282) has “chikors”, which in India is a synonym for kabg-i-darī; the Mémoires (ii, 122) has sauterelles, but this meaning of chīūrtika does not suit wintry January. That month would suit for the descent from higher altitudes of snow-cocks. Griffith, a botanist who travelled in Afghānistān cir. 1838 AD., saw myriads of cicadæ between Qilat-i-ghilzai and Ghazni, but the month was July.
d. On the qūt̤ān (f. 142, p. 224; Memoirs, p. 153; Mémoires ii, 313).
Mr. Erskine for qūt̤ān enters khawāṣil [gold-finch] which he will have seen interlined in the Elphinstone Codex (f. 109b) in explanation of qūt̤ān.
Shaikh Effendi (Kunos’ ed., p. 139) explains qūt̤ān to be the gold-finch, Steiglitz.
Ilminsky’s qūtān (p. 175) is translated by M. de Courteille as pélicane and certainly some copies of the 2nd Persian translation [Muḥ. Shīrāzi’s p. 90] have ḥawāṣil, pelican.
The pelican would class better than the small finch with the herons and egrets of Bābur’s trio; it also would appear a more likely bird to be caught “with the cord”.
That Bābur’s qūt̤ān (ḥawāṣil) migrated in great numbers is however against supposing it to be Pelicanus onocrotatus which is seen in India during the winter, because it appears there in moderate numbers only, and Blanford with other ornithologists states that no western pelican migrates largely into India.
Perhaps the qūt̤ān was Linnæus’ Pelicanus carbo of which one synonym is Carbo comoranus, the cormorant, a bird seen in India in large numbers of both the large and small varieties. As cormorants are not known to breed in that country, they will have migrated in the masses Bābur mentions.