168 BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, 



" The bird sent me is a young bird, a year old or thereabouts,. 

 and I cannot help fearing (every one who has taken their nests in 

 Europe knows how difficult it is to catch thein on their nests) that 

 Mr. Legge's specimens may all have been young birds that 

 remained behind when their parents returned to their breeding 

 haunts, and that the eggs which he attributes to them in reality 

 belonged to individuals of the next species." 



The following season (1873), Captain Legge again found them 

 breeding and shot the old birds from the nest, but still Mr. Hume 

 remained unconvinced. 



Up to the present time I am not aware of anything "more beiDg 

 placed on record regarding the breeding of the Kentish Plover 

 within Indian limits, but Dr. Scully found them breeding on the 

 25th April in Eastern Turkistan, and it will perhaps be remembered 

 that Captain Butler shot a specimen at the island of Henjam, in the 

 Persian Gulf, in May, with the testes much developed as if breeding,, 

 but he does not say what plumage this particular bird was in. He 

 also says that he found the Kentish Plover breeding on the bare' 

 sandy plain at Jashk ; and although he found no eggs, he caught 

 a young bird unable to fly, about ten days old, and a specimen he 

 shot at the same time was in winter plumage. 



On the ,28th April of the present year, Mr. J. W. N. Gumming, 

 a young but earnest and reliable fellow-worker in Oology, found a 

 clutch of three eggs placed in a slight depression in the sand at 

 the base of a small hillock not far from the sea j on the &th May 

 he found three .nestlings of the same species, and from his descrip- 

 tion of the manner in which the parent bird (which he shot) 

 tried to entice him from their vicinity, there can be no reasonable 

 doubt of their authenticity. 



This skin was forwarded by Mr. Gumming to the Honorary 

 Secretary of the Bombay Natural History Society, from whom I 

 received it. It is without doubt a young bird of JEgialitis cantianus, 

 exactly as Mr. Hume describes ; but to prevent any possibility of 

 error I had the skin identified by Mr. Murray, Manager of the 

 Victoria Natural History Institute, Mazagon, and for many years 

 Curator to the Karachi Municipal Museum, who, after a most careful 

 examination, fully endorsed my identification. Mr. Cumming's 

 valuable find has therefore confirmed Colonel Legge's assertion, 

 that the eggs he took in Ceylon belonged to M. cantianus and 

 Bot to JEJ. dubia. 



