The Oologists' Record, March i, 192 1. 



distractions arose from long grass at this time of the evening ! 

 This I am afraid is rather a long introduction to a short list, and I 

 must add that the birds which strike one first do not apparently 

 nest there, as the glorious Carmine Bee-eater, Merops nuhicus, Gm. 

 The following is a list of the species observed breeding, including 

 also one or two which I got in 1918, but not this year. The nomen- 

 clature is Reichenow's, the English names those of Haagner and 

 Gunning so far as they went : beyond that I fear 1 invented them. 

 Locality is Ras Mwaka Singe except where Mombasa Island is 

 mentioned. Latitude is about 4° south of the Equator. Of 

 course, many other birds breed which I was not lucky enough to 

 find eggs of, e.g., a Drongo, a Sylvietta, two or three Woodpeckers, 

 the Shrike, Lanius caudaUis, Cab. The beautiful Golden Pipit, 

 Tmetothylacus tenellns {Cab.), was quite common and certainly breed- 

 ing in 1918, but I saw nothing of it in 1920 on the same ground even 

 better explored. 



Turtur capicola tropicus, Rchw. The local race of the Cape 

 Turtle Dove, with its monotonous triple coo, " Tokaaba, tokaaba " 

 as the Baganda say, was common and nested freely. A pair of 

 eggs taken at end of July, 1918, were in a nest built in a mangrove 

 standing in a creek of the sea. 



Chalcopelia afra (L.) and C. chalcospilos, Wagl. Reichenow 

 first lumped, then split, these. C. afra, with blue-spotted wings, is, 

 he says, the larger, the other smaller with green wing spots. Van 

 Someren distinguishes them easily, but says you get blue, green, and 

 bronzy wing-spots, all in C. afra. These doctors disagreeing, I 

 confess I cannot tell one from the other bird in the field, and I had 

 no gun at Ras Mwaka. I took clutches of i, 2 and 2, of which one 

 clutch of 2 was much larger than the others. The single was in a 

 nest built on a broad swath of dead cocoanut bark which had 

 fallen into a guava tree. The nests themselves are very small and 

 frail, usually built about five feet from the ground. 



Francolinus granti, Hartl. Grant's Spur-fowl. (?) On 5th 

 ■ September a Francolin flew up in long grass at my feet. The nest, 

 containing two eggs, hard-set and with shells so hard I had to file 

 them through, was siinply a depression in the blackish soil (which 

 here lay shallowly over the coral) not bigger than the palm of one's 

 hand. It was a few yards away from a bush. The grass, about 

 two feet high, was nearly dead. There was no lining to the nest, 



