THE HONEY-GUIDES 137 



the male should act as a foil, to draw off the barbets on guard while 

 the female deposits her egg, seems Hke too good a story not to have 

 entered into the recording of whatever may have actually transpired. 



Usually only one egg is laid in any one nest (46 cases). The only 

 instances I know of where more than one greater honey-guide egg 

 has been found are the following two, further mentioned in the 

 accounts of the host species. In Southern Rhodesia, Neuby-Varty 

 found a nest of an African hoopoe with three eggs of its own and two 

 of the greater honey-guide. The honey-guide eggs were almost 

 identical in size (24.5 by 19.25 mm. and 24.5 by 19.5 mm.) and may 

 have been laid by one bird. At Bloemhof, in the Transvaal, Plowes 

 found three honey-guide eggs in a nest of a scimitar-bill, Rhino- 

 pomastus cyanomelas. In this case, judging by the variations in their 

 dimensions, it seemed that they were laid by three different individuals. 



There are statements in the literature that suggest that when laying 

 into a nest the honey-guide removes an egg of the victim's, but these 

 are not based on any real observations and are merely inferences made 

 subsequently to explain the small number of the host's eggs in the 

 nest. Thus, to take but one example: Near Essexvale, eastern Cape 

 Province, the usual clutch of the pied starling, Spreo bicolor, is five 

 eggs; yet, during three successive years, in every starling nest that 

 had a honey-guide egg, Brian Stuckenberg of Rhodes University 

 CoUege found either three or four eggs of the starling. He attributed 

 this fact to the possibility of the honey-guide having removed an 

 egg or two of the host's when laying its own. He looked carefully 

 for bits of egg remains on the ground outside the nest holes but never 

 saw any, and concluded that if the parasites did remove any eggs 

 they took them off some distance before disposing of them. On the 

 other hand, we have the fact that in many of the parasitized clutches 

 the number of eggs of the host is not less than in nonparasitized nests 

 of the same species. In the related Indicator variegatus we have some 

 direct, positive evidence that no egg of the host is removed by the 

 laying parasite. That the greater honey-guide may steal an egg from 

 a nest is suggested by one somewhat tangential observation. Skead 

 (1951, p. 61) has recorded seeing a male Indicator indicator fly from a 

 nest of a bar-throated warbler (Apalis thoracia) with an egg in its bill. 

 This case, unique in recorded data, is a little different from the matter 

 of removal of a host's egg to make room for one of the parasite's, as it 

 was a male bird that stole the egg and it involved a species not known 

 to be parasitized by the honey-guide. 



There is a good deal of evidence that the honey-guide punctures, 

 either with its bill or its claws, the eggs in a nest when laying one of 

 its own. Data on 20 such cases are included in the discussion of each 

 of the various host species involved — Halcyon chelicuti, Melittophagus 



