AJ'ES. 49 



64. Ccttia scricca. Temm. Man. d'Orn. i., p. 197. Cetti's Warbler. 



Cetti's Warbler may be frequently heard, but rarely seen, among the 

 willows by small watercourses. Its note is very fine and powerful, but 

 suddenly broken, like the first part of a nightingale's abruptly cut 

 short. 



I formerly described the Palestine bird as distinct, Ccttia oricntalis 

 [Ibis, 1867, p. 79) ; but though there is a slight difference in colour, and 

 the bill is much longer and wider at the base than in any European 

 specimens, the differences are scarcely sufficient on which to found a 

 species. 



Cetti's Warbler is found resident on both shores of the Mediterranean, 

 in Egypt, Turkestan, and Sclnde. 



FAMILY, TIMELIID.^. 



65. Argya squamiccps. (Riipp. Atlas, p. 19.) Hopping Thrush. 



Few birds have a more circumscribed limit than this Bush Babbler, 

 one of the peculiar denizens of the Dead Sea basin. It does not even 

 extend up the valley of the Jordan, but is strictly confined to the larger 

 oases round the Dead Sea itself. Nowhere else did it come under our 

 observation ; and thus we find a distinct and most characteristic species 

 belonging to a tropical family, limited to an area of forty miles by twenty, 

 and not occupying more than ten square miles of that area. The Hopping 

 Thrushes are sociable and noisy birds, always in small bands, though not in 

 large flocks, hopping along the ground in a long line, with jerking tail, and 

 then one after another running up a bush, where they maintain a noisy 

 conversation till the stranger's approach, when they drop down in single 

 file and run along the ground, to repeat the same proceedings in the next 

 tree. The nest is a large structure of strips of bark loosely woven 

 together and placed in the very centre of a zizyphus thorn-tree, containing 

 four to six glossy dark-green eggs. Beyond the Dead Sea basin this bird is 

 said to be found in Arabia, near Akabah, and in the Hedjaz in bushes and 

 trees. Its food, so far as my own observation goes, is exclusively the 

 berries of the zizyphus, which may be found all the year round. 



