Mr. Swynnerton on Mixed Bird-parties. 349 



seemed to make it its business, in ones or twos or threes, to 

 search every inch of each trunk, each twig and each bunch 

 of foliage from above and from below, from the Macrorungias 

 inclusive up to the full height of 50 feet — perhaps higher, 

 could I have seen further through the masses of foliage. 

 They were probing crannies, picking loose scraps of bark 

 from trunks and dead twigs, searching the dense green moss 

 gn the rainy sides of the former^ deliberately shaking dead 

 leaves or peering into their curled-up recesses and keeping 

 the foliage generally in that continual rustle of movement to 

 which I have already alluded. 



" With the Barratt's Bulbuls, but usually just above and 

 to the side of some small working party, were a pair of forest 

 Drongos [Dicruriis ludivigi) and of White-spotted Fly- 

 catchers [Trochocercus albunotatus) . The Flycatchers were 

 continuously on the move ; when not watching the beaters 

 and capturing what they put out (several attacks on minute 

 flying objects wathin two or three feet of working Bulbuls 

 were presumably of this nature), they kept flying off at small 

 insects in mid-air or moving restlessly from twig to twig, 

 often with the quaint tail-display they are so addicted to, 

 and frequently removing small objects from the upper or 

 under surfaces of leaves. They thus themselves took some 

 small share in the ' beating.' 



''The Drongos far less : they confined themselves almost 

 entirely to taking insects on the wing, several times dashing 

 to within a foot or two of a ' beater ' in pursuit of some 

 object flushed by him. The only victim tliat I could defi- 

 nitely identify was a beetle, probably an Anthribid, that had 

 been dislodged by a Bulbul and was falling to the ground 

 when it was dexterously snapped up by a Drongo and 



carried to his perch nearly above my head Later 



on, two Barratt's Bulbuls fell headlong in pursuit of an 

 object dislodged by one of them, and one of the Drongos 

 joined in. The object of their pursuit, whatever it was, 

 reached the ground and one of the Bulbuls remained to 

 search, while a third, from elsewhere, came and hovered 

 over the spot for a few seconds, the Drongo and the second 



