22 BRITISH BIRDS. 
step of their horses, like sand-lice on the sea-shore from a piece of seaweed 
left by the tide.” After they had passed they saw “a great globe in the 
air, which suddenly turned, expanded, and, like a vast fan, descended to 
the ground,” which was in a few seconds covered with a moving black 
mass, dappled with pink. After watching them for some minutes, the 
party turned back and rode up to them. They rose quietly, but not till 
they were close on them. So eager had the birds been in search of their 
prey that not a locust was to be seen. At another place the party came 
suddenly, after mounting a gentle ascent, on the crater of an extinct 
voleano, full of water, and surrounded with basalt boulders. As they 
approached, their attention was attracted by one of these flights of Rose- 
coloured Starlings, which had alighted to drink, and which rose in alarm 
and darkened the air overhead. At another place a solitary tree over a 
well was so covered with them that the colour of the tree changed from 
black to green as they approached and frightened the birds away. The 
natives all declared the visits of these birds to be most uncertain and occa- 
sional, and said that they had not met with them for three years. They 
only see them on the spring migration, when their flight is always from 
east to west. Canon Tristram adds that they were all apparently in full 
breeding-plumage. 
The mystery which for some time shrouded the breeding of the Rose- 
coloured Starling has been at length completely dispelled. The old 
stories of their breeding in hollow trees, and the modern Greek or Bulgar 
fables of their boring holes in banks like Sand-Martins, are entirely 
unsupported by evidence. The Rose-coloured Starling is essentially a 
Rock-Starling in its breeding-habits. When I was in the Dobrudscha in 
the spring of 1883, I visited a village about three miles north of Kustendji, 
where these birds had bred in great numbers the preceding year. They 
had occupied a pile of rough building-stone, most of which was, unfortu- 
nately, removed during the following winter. A small heap near a cottage 
still remained, and I was informed by the peasant who lived there that it 
had been full of nests. After removing a few stones from the top I soon 
came upon the old nests. They were more carefully made than those of 
the Starling, and might easily have been mistaken for nests of the Ring- 
Ouzel; they were chiefly composed of dry grass, but in several of them 
a few feathers were interwoven. Mr. Barkley, in his ‘ Bulgaria before 
the War,’ describes two similar breeding-places between Rustchuk and 
Varna, where thousands took possession of a mound of broken stone and 
rock thrown out of a cutting on the railway. In several parts of the 
Dobrudscha I met German emigrants from Bessarabia who told me that 
the Rose-coloured Starling not unfrequently bred in thousands in the 
peasants’ gardens, which are surrounded by rough stone walls, in the holes 
of which the nests are made. These birds also often breed between 
