The Oologists' Record, June i, 1922. 41 



form is humeralis (Staul.), but the differences are certainly not more 

 than subspecilic. 



l.anius souzae (Boc). — Sharpe records Souza's Shrike from the 

 Bua River in Angoniland, but I was surprised to meet with it so 

 far south as Blantyre, to which district I imagine it to be a spring 

 migrant from the north. For I did not see it between the beginning 

 of March and the end of September in what I was later to learn 

 were its breeding haunts. I first saw one in the Masuku scrub 

 near Nyambadwe Hill on October gth, and at a hurried glance took 

 it for a Red-backed Shrike. On the 29th of the same month one 

 of my garden boys took me to see a nest in the fork of a Masuku 

 about 15 feet from the ground, which I did not doubt was a Kurri- 

 chane Thrush's {Tiirdus libonyanus) until he brought it down with 

 three eggs, obviously not Thrush's and yet somehow familiar in 

 type. The nest was Shrike-hke. Suddenly I remembered : the 

 eggs wefe exactly like those of Lanius mackinnoni of Uganda. 

 The bo}^ put back the nest as best he could, and I waited for perhaps 

 twenty minutes, when along came an undoubted Lanius souzae 

 and flew up to the nest. Later in the year this pair of birds hatched 

 young in this neighbourhood. On December i8th, when I. thought 

 the season would be well over, I shot a specimen which, to my 

 disappointment, turned out on skinning to be a female in breeding 

 condition : I returned to where I had shot it and found a half- 

 ■built nest in a tree close by. The nest first-taken is of an irregular 

 shape, to fit the perpendicular triple fork in which it was built. 

 It measured 5 inches over all across, and 2 inches deep, the inside 

 cup being 2| inches wide by nearly an inch deep. It is composed 

 of all manner of small twigs, insect cocoons, and a little lichen^ 

 and lined with long pieces of fine grass. It is exactly like that of 

 Lanius mackinnoni, and so are the eggs, which are of a greenish 

 white ground-colour, sprinkled all over with very fine freckles of light 

 brown and light purple tending to form a zone near the top end. 

 They measure 2i| mm. x io| mm. This bird inhabits actual wood- 

 lands, while L. collar is prefers open country with scattered bushes 

 and scrubby trees. The only note I heard from it was low and 

 scraping, but that was when the adults were flying about with 

 newly fledged young. 



C. F. B. 



