22 
my experience goes, nearly inaccessible and precipitous cliffs 
to breed on, but as I have only yet found it breeding in two 
places, vis. at the Taragurh hill near Ajmere, and the Gaimookh 
cliffs on Mt. Aboo, I cannot speak positively. Jerdon, however, 
mentions, that the present species breeds on ‘‘ some of the cliffs 
bounding the valley, in which are situated the celebrated caves 
of Ajunta.”’ 
The nest, placed on some ledge of the cliff’s face, consists only 
of coarse sticks and twigs. When the eggs are first laid, there 
may be some lining of leaves, as in those of many other kinds 
of vultures and eagles, but when I examined a number of the 
nests, the young were all hatched, and the nest so coated with 
their droppings, that it was impossible to trace any lining. ‘The 
nest is nothing more than a thin, flat, irregularly circular, pad of 
sticks, from 2 to 3 feet in diameter, and from 3 to 6 inches in 
depth. As arule they only lay a single egg; of all the 50 odd 
to which, with extreme difficulty, | made my way, not one con- 
tained more than a single young one, and not one could boast even 
a single addled egg. Captain Repton, Deputy Commissioner of 
Ajmere, very kindly secured for me a noble series of eggs from 
these very nests, ten months after I had visited them. The 
egos’ normal type is a very long oval. Taken as a body, they 
are very much larger than those of Oalvus or Bengalensis, and 
their texture is, if anything, somewhat finer than that of either 
of these two species; as a rule, they are of an unspotted, very 
pale greyish or greenish white, but some are thinly spotted and 
blotched with pale reddish brown, or in some cases faint 
purplish brown. One only that I possess is rich/y blotched and 
mottled, chiefly, however, towards the smaller end, with some- 
what pale brownish and purplish red, about equally interming- 
led; this is the handsomest Vulture’s egg, I have yet seen. 
They vary in length from 3-9 to 3°48, and in breadth from 2°85 
to 2°62, the average dimensions of 21 eggs were 3°61 X 2°72. 
The breeding places of this species, (they appear always 
to breed in society,) are very picturesquely situated. The 
Taragurh hill which overlooks and almost overhangs the 
city of Ajmere and the beautiful Ana Sagur Lake, may be about 
2,900 feet high. On precipitous faces of this hill, specially 
where succeeding overlapping ledges make the place as nearly 
inaccessible as may be, colonies of this Vulture breed. One of 
these breeding-haunts, which I minutely examined, was a cliff 
face some 100 feet high by 300 wide, all broken up into irregu- 
lar ledges, of which the highest overhung all the rest. In 
amongst the ledges were a few dwarf banyan trees, whose long 
bare roots and rootlets hung down, here and there, in dense, 
