Nidification of Indian Birds. 347 



nests than ours do liere^ and their nests also differ in having 

 two entrances. None of the nests which I have seen have 

 been thus provided, and I have no notes of any exceeding 

 6 inches in longest diameter, whereas some found in Kanara 

 are nearly a foot in length. They seem also to breed 

 early in the year in the west, whereas here I have 

 taken a single fresh egg as late as the 9th of September, 

 and another one was sent me which had been taken about 

 the 15th. 



I have seen 18 eggs of this little Spider-hunter, and in all 

 the ground-colour is just the same, in one only being slightly 

 tinged with grey ; in the others it is of a pale pinky cream- 

 colour, clear, but by no means bright iu tint. The markings 

 consist primarily of freckles and small blotches of light 

 brownish red, some with rather a pink tinge, and secondarily 

 of others of pale lavender and pinkish lavender. In most eggs 

 they form an exceedingly well-defined ring, about 0"*2 broad, 

 in which the markings are so numerous that for about two- 

 thirds the width of the ring they all coalesce and form a 

 continuous mass of colour, the general hue of wdiich is a pale 

 reddish brown, blurred here and there with a purplish tinge 

 where the subordinate marks show through the others. 

 Elsewhere, as a rule, the markings are very scanty, and 

 they are never numerous. On one pair of eggs the blotches 

 form a blurred indistinct cap. On a few eggs the subordinate 

 blotches are absent, which gives a bolder, brighter character 

 to them, and in another eg^ there are about half-a-dozen 

 rather large blotches of yellowish brown. 



One egg — the one I noted above as being greyer than the 

 others — has the markings more subdued, and also more 

 equally distributed over the whole surface of the e^^, though 

 the ring is still very plainly defined. This egg is extremely 

 like in character those of ^thopyga. Indeed, all are far 

 more like the eggs of that genus in every respect than they 

 are those of A. magna. In the latter bird's eggs the texture 

 is close, fine, and hard, the surface extremely smooth, often 

 with a decided gloss, and the shell is fairly stout. Those of 

 A. longirostris have the grain fine, but not very close, the 



SER. VII. VOL. n. 2 c 



