36 The Oologists' Record^ June i, 1921. 



a finger has been put into the entrance hole. Nests are beautifully 

 constructed of fine dead grasses interwoven with vegetable wool 

 and plant down — and are thickly lined with the latter. They vary 

 much in size and shape — some are almost globular, others elongated 

 ovals, others more sausage-shaped, while the entrance holes are 

 usually at the side, though sometimes almost at the top. Nests 

 in most cases are firmly woven to the stems of plants, shrubs, 

 etc., but I have seen quite a number which have been suspended 

 from mimosa and pomegranate branches as much as 6 feet above 

 the ground, when they are generally very conspicuous, but in most 

 instances the nests are well concealed. Nests are never placed 

 in the middle of thick brambles or dense cover, though often at the 

 edge, and I have found them both high up and low down in mimosa 

 hedges, in pomegranate trees, in the bushy foliage of pollarded 

 eucalyptus, in tiny scrubby bushes barely a foot above the ground 

 in dried up marsh land — in tall grass and aquatic herbage in the 

 actual marshes, in small plum trees ; and in the tall grassy cover 

 growing in waste land, along the hedge-rows, in ditches, excavations 

 and other situations of a similar nature. An occasional nest is 

 found in an orange grove, but this is unusual; hedge-rows, etc., 

 and the scrubby cover at the fringe of marshes I can confidently 

 recommend as being the best hunting grounds. Nests are usually 

 placed less than 3 feet above the ground, except when in pome- 

 granate and eucalyptus or other bushy trees, when they are mostly 

 situated at a height of 4 to 6 feet. Although seemingly quite 

 fearless of human beings, these birds scold incessantly on the 

 approach of cats or snakes, and I always knew when a big black 

 Rat Snake (Dhaman) nearly 7 feet long, was about, by the incessant 

 chatter of a pair of Prinia which had a nest above his subterranean 

 home, though well out of his reach. These birds have a trick of 

 covering up the eggs with the soft plant down and vegetable wool 

 of the lining during the middle of the day, and leaving the tempera- 

 ture of the air to carry oiit the incubation, and on several occasions 

 I was nearly caught by this fact, and the first time it was only 

 chance that led me to discover the eggs under a thick layer of soft 

 lining material, as, luckily, I had known that eggs were there a 

 few days previously when they had only just been laid. This habit 

 was occasionally resorted to by Goldfinches in Palestine. It is 

 probably due to this habit that I often noticed that Wren Warblers 

 would scratch out the inside lining of their nests after the eggs 



