THE HONEY-GUIDES 191 



not laid. Skead (1951, p. 53) records one instance in which a lesser 

 honey-guide came into his garden where a pair of black-collared 

 barbets were Hving. This was in September, when the barbets were 

 neither nesting nor using the holes in the trees there for sleeping. 

 The pair of barbets was feeding at the time and immediately reacted 

 towards the honey-guide, shrieking loudly, something they ordinarily 

 do not do to other bu"ds. The honey-guide was in no way perturbed 

 by this, and in spite of the screams of the birds it casually looked into 

 the old barbet nest as it passed. This habit of looking into nest 

 holes may be responsible for the erroneous statement in the literature 

 to the effect that the honey-guides show a certain amount of interest 

 in their young while the latter are still in the nests of the fosterers. 

 There is no evidence that they attempt to do anything for their young. 



One observation of Gilges (1939) suggests that the nests in which 

 the eggs are laid may be located in advance and visited some time 

 before an egg is actually ready to be laid. Gilges found a lesser 

 honey-guide trying to enter a nest of a black-collared barbet, Lyhius 

 torguatus, only to be driven off repeatedly by the owners. It was so 

 persistent that Gilges felt it probably had an egg ready to be laid. 

 He shot it and found to his surprise that none of the ova was within 

 many days of being ready. 



As far as the still meager data permit one to draw a conclusion, it 

 seems that the honey-guide does not necessarily remove one of the 

 host's eggs when laying its own in the nest. In support of this state- 

 ment I may point out that out of 14 parasitized nests of the black 

 collared barbet, each with a single egg of the parasite, the number of 

 the barbet's eggs was 4 in each of four nests, 3 in each of five nests, 

 2 in each of four nests, and 1 in one nest. The usual clutch of the 

 barbet in nonparasitized nests is 3 or 4 eggs. Those nests in which 

 the barbets' eggs were only 2 or 1 in number may have been nests in 

 which laying had not been completed. However, in at least one 

 instance we have data showing that a barbet's egg was removed, and, 

 inferentially, that it probably was done by a honey-guide. The 

 facts are as follows: Ranger found a black-collared barbet's nest 

 containing 4 eggs of the barbet on November 2; on November 9 he 

 reinspected it and found only 3 of the barbet's eggs and 2 of the lesser 

 honey-guide's. The apparent implication is that the missing barbet 

 egg was removed when one of the parasitic eggs was deposited, 

 although the second honey-guide egg was not laid at the expense of 

 stiU another barbet egg. 



I know of no instance in which the host's eggs were punctured or 

 otherwise damaged by the lesser honey-guide. This is rather sur- 

 prising when one considers that in the greater honey-guide, Indicator 

 indicator, egg puncturing is very frequent. 



