692 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XII. 



I -visited the Nicobars in August and on a subsequent visit of the ' Elphin- 

 stone' in February. 



The mounds of this bird are almost always placed near the shore» a few 

 yards inside the edge of the jungle. The object of this is to obtain a 

 mixture <i the rich leaf mould of the forest with the fine pulverised coral 

 of the beach. 



All sorts of vegetable rubbish are accumulated, some of the mounds in time 

 reaching an enormous size ; Davison says that on the coast they average 

 5 feet high ard 30 feet in circumference, but that he saw one which must 

 have been at least 8 feet high and 60 feet in circumference. 



Davison found that the eggs are laid at considerable intervals, the next 

 egg in the ovary of a bird which had just laid being no bigger than a pea. 

 The egg laid might have been the last of the clutch, but the enormous size 

 of the eggs in proportion to that of the bird, and the fact that they are found 

 some fresh and some on the point of hatching in the same mound, quite 

 bear out Davison's opinion. 



The eggs when laid are clayey pink ; as incubation progresses they 

 become a buft'y stone-colour, and before hatching pale brown or dirty 

 coffee-colour. Mr. Hume gives the average measurements of 62 as 

 3-25 X 2-07. 



Apparently sometimes one pair of birds and sometimes two or three 

 use the same mound, 20 eggs having been taken together from a large 

 heap. 



The small mound that 1 examined was made in the hollow centre of a 

 large tree between the roots, which divided into four large buttresses. It 

 was not more than 2 feet high and 4 feet in diameter, and jrobably belonged 

 to only one pair of birds. It contained one fresh pink egg, bnried at about 

 two feet below the surface. Fermentation in this mound had hardly com- 

 menced, the temperature inside being hardly higher than that of any of the 

 surrounding sand. The heap looked more like a lot of rubbish drifted in 

 Ijctween the tree roots than the usual nest of the bird. 



Davison says : "The eggs are usually buried from oh to 4 feet deep, and 

 how the young manage to extricate themse'ves from the superincumbent 

 mass of soil and rubbish seems a mystery ; most probably they are assisted 

 by their parents, if not entirely freed by them." 



I think that the young always work their way to the surface quite unaided. 

 For one thing the birds could never know — ■with eggs in different stages of 

 incubation in the same mound — when to dig down to save u newly hatched 

 young one from suffocation ; further the eggs can be hatched by packing 

 them in a box in the material of the mound in which they are found, and 

 Mr. E. H. Man, who hatclied a chick in his verandah by this means, told me 

 that it not only extricated itself from the sand, hnijlew up on to the verandah 

 railing directly it was approached. 



