168 FALCONID^E. 



says : " A bird much of tener seen than shot. It is quite common 

 along the course of the Attaran with its two branches, the Zammee 

 and Wimgeo choungs, on the Yoonzaleen and along the whole 

 length of the Thoungyeen from its sources to its mouth. In my 

 many trips up the Salween, the largest river of the lot, to which 

 the others are but tributaries, I have not, strange to sa} r , noticed a 

 single one. 



" On the 3rd March, being encamped near the mouth of the 

 Hteekleethoo choung, a small stream falling from the east side of 

 the Meplay East Watershed range, and flowing to the Thoun- 

 gyeen river, my attention was attracted, as I sat outside my tent 

 in the evening, by the persistent passing of one of these Eagles 

 backwards and forwards between two large kanyin trees (Diptero- 

 carpus alatus). The trees not being more than a few hundred yards 

 off, I made my way to them, and found that a large stick nest had 

 been built in the first fork of the largest of them, at a height of 

 at least a hundred feet. 



" Next morning I sent up a couple of Karens, who managed to 

 climb the tree in the usual way by means of bamboo pegs, and 

 brought me down the solitary egg the nest contained. The nest 

 they, or rather the one man who went up the whole way, described 

 as a large mass of sticks and twigs without any depression in the 

 centre scarcely, and unlined. 



" The egg was chalky white, rather a broad oval, without mark- 

 ings of any kind, and perfectly fresh. It measures 2'58 by 2'03 

 inches. During the robbery the birds flew about uneasily round 

 and round the tree, but out of shot, and it was not till after an 

 hour's watching and stalking I managed to bag one of them, 

 which, on dissection, proved to be the female with another perfect 

 but shelless egg inside her." 



Colonel W. V. Legge, writing from Ceylon of this Eagle, says : 

 " The Fish-Eagle breeds with us in December, nesting in large 

 trees, both along the coast and by the side of the fine old tanks 

 in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. I find from my rough 

 notes that a nest, from which, on the 4th of January, 1873, I 

 took a young bird six weeks old, was made in the fork of an upper 

 limb of a large tree on the sea-coast to the north of Trincomalie ; 

 it was constructed of sticks, some of them an inch in diameter, 

 and measured 3 or 4 feet across in one direction, and about 

 2| feet in another, and contained enough material to have half 

 filled an ordinary bullock cart. The interior was very flat and 

 constructed of small twigs." 



The egg is of the usual type, a broad but pretty regular oval 

 slightly pointed towards one end. The ground greyish white, 

 often a good deal soiled in the course of incubation, but in the 

 case of all the few specimens I have seen devoid of markings. 

 Held up against the light the shell is very pure, rather bright, sea- 

 green. There is less pitting, I think, on the surface of the eggs of 

 this species than those of many other allied species, but I have 

 seen too few of the eggs to speak positively on this head. 



Two eggs measured 2'7 by 2-1 and 2-63 by 2-08. 



