TEKPSIPHOTTE. 23 



cavity varies in diameter from 2 to 2'75, and in depth from 1 to 1/6. 

 There is, not uncommonly, a good deal of horsehair woven in the 

 interior surface of the cavity, and this, with the finer grass which 

 is used in this part of the nest, forms a sort of lining. The walls 

 of the nest are scarcely above | inch in thickness, and where the 

 nest rests, as it often does, on the flat surface of some broad hori- 

 /ontal bough, just where some twig (which is then firmly incorpor- 

 ated in the nest) rises perpendicularly or nearly so from that surface, 

 the bottom of the nest is hardly thicker, but at times, when fitted 

 in between two or three such twigs, it is as much as 2 or 2| inches 

 in thickness. The nests in fact exhibit the forms of those of both 

 Rhipidura aureola and It. albicollis, and though larger and perhaps, 

 as a rule, somewhat less densely coated with cobwebs, closely re- 

 semble these, as they do also, in a somewhat less degree, those of 

 ^Et/ithina tiphia and Tephrodornis pondiceriana. 



The full number of eggs laid is four. 



As to the plumage in which these birds breed, Mr. Gould says 

 (* Birds of Asia') : " I believe that when the long feathers have 

 been once acquired by either sex, they are not again thrown off, 

 and that they are not a seasonal or breeding characteristic, as some 

 authors have supposed; the short-tailed birds, which are always 

 chestnut, are very young birds." 



This, according to my experience, is certainly wrong. I have 

 taken from first to last some thirty nests, and in every case found 

 the sitting female to be a short-tailed cinnamon-coloured bird, and 

 in (dmost every case I found the male to be a long-tailed cinnamon- 

 coloured bird. In a very few cases the males were white, and in a 

 few parti-coloured. 



AVriting some years ago from Bareilly in June, I said : " In the 

 public gardens is a large circular reservoir, dry and empty during 

 the hot season, but now half full of water ; on the banks on one 

 side are a number of sheeshum trees (Dalbergia sissoo), and on one of 

 the outermost branches of these, at the very end, where the branch 

 hangs nearly straight downwards, and where only one independent 

 twig dissenting from its principal persists in growing straight up- 

 wards, there, between branch and twig, was placed a half egg-shaped 

 nest, a mere shell, very closely and compactly woven of fine grass- 

 roots and grass, thickly coated exteriorly with cobwebs, in amongst 

 which a great number of small white empty cocoons had been inter- 

 woven. The nest was nowhere much above inch in thickness, 

 and the cavity was about 2| inches in diameter at the margin and 

 1| inch deep. A nest we took the other day was seated on a 

 horizontal branch of a mango tree, had horsehair and a little 

 fine tow interwoven with the grass interiorly, and was a trifle 

 smaller ; exteriorly the two were precisely similar. 



" On this nest, its head tucked close in, with only the beak pro- 

 jecting in front, but with the whole tail from the vent showing 

 beyond the nest behind, sat a chestnut female, whose centre tail- 

 feathers were not in the slightest degree elongated. The nest 

 contained three fresh eggs, precisely similar to the four which we 



