10 SPOLIA ZEYLANICA. 
the chief enemies of butterflies in the imago stage, and what evidence 
is there that they exercise discrimination in their Rhopaloceran diet ? 
Information of this sort is notoriously difficult to obtain, and I have 
therefore not hesitated to put on record the following observations, 
meagre though they be, which appear to bear upon the point. 
(A) Birds.—To what extent butterflies are preyed upon by birds 
is a question which has excited much controversy in recent years, 
and such information as exists upon the subject has lately been 
brought together by Marshall.* Many birds will undoubtedly 
devour butterflies upon occasion, though it seems unlikely, except 
in a few cases such as those of Merops and Microhierax, that they 
make a regular practice of it. From a nutritive point of view, there 
is a good deal of waste material in a butterfly. At the same time 
it is rather a cumbrous mouthful, and it is not unnatural to suppose 
that with insect life of other kinds abounding the bird would devote 
its attention to more succulent species. But a hungry bird will 
probably take what it can get, without inquiring very closely whether 
the insect belongs to what are termed unpalatable groups or not. 
Marshall, for instance, quotes observations of Doflein to show that 
P. hector may be captured by Merops in Ceylon. 
During my ten weeks’ stay in Ceylon and S. India, I endeavoured 
to keep my eyes open as far as possible to any evidence of butterflies 
being attacked by birds. Only on one occasion did I observe a 
bird directly attacking a butterfly. Im Peradeniya, one day, at the 
edge of some jungle, I was cautiously stalking a specimen of Papilio 
agamemnon. When within about 6 feet of it, and in hopes of trans- 
ferring a desirable specimen to my pocket, a magpie robin suddenly 
swooped down upon it. It completely missed the butterfly, which, 
however, to my regret, was scared away. Upon another occasion 
I noticed near Trincomalee a butterfly flutterg in the middle of 
the road. On examination it turned out to be a specimen of 
P. agamemnon, with the wings of the right side clean shorn away 
near the base. The specimen was otherwise uninjured. Though 
there is no direct evidence, it seems not unlikely that in this case a 
bird may have been responsible for the damage. This was all the 
evidence in favour of birds attacking butterflies that I was able to 
collect from personal observation, but my friend Mr. MacBride, of 
the Public Works Department at Trincomalee, told me that he had 
once seen crows catching butterflies as they swarmed round a 
flowering tree. Unfortunately he was unable to say for certain 
what the butterfly was, but from his description I am inclined to 
think that it was a species of Huplea (probably H. core). 
On the other hand, I have frequently watched birds hawking 
insects on some flowering tree where butterflies abounded, but have 
never seen them even offer to attack. Close to the verandah of a 

* Trans. Ent. Soc., Lond., 1909. 
