236 ARDEIDJE. 



ing trees), with a very slight central depression, in which without 

 any lining the eggs were laid. 



" It was clear that they built from choice in this situation, as 

 many large trees were standing round them on which most of the 

 other species of Heron would certainly have built. The eggs were 

 nearly without exception fresh. Two nests contained five, others 

 four, and the rest a lesser number. There were about twenty 

 couple, and we took forty-six eggs. The note of this bird is less 

 harsh than that of the Common Heron ; still, the uproar was great 

 whilst the men were robbing the nests, and the extraordinary 

 chattering that they made, condoling with each other when on re- 

 occupying their nests they found them empty, was most comical." 



Mr. Scrope Doig writes from Sind : " Their nests, made of 

 sticks, were on tamarisk-trees in dense jungle in the water ; the 

 usual number of eggs in a nest was four, but in some cases there 

 were five." 



And Colonel Butler, renting his own and Mr. Doig's experiences, 

 says : " On visiting the E. Narra, Sind, with Mr. Doig on the 

 22nd July, 1878, we found one or two tamarisk-thickets, stand- 

 ing out in the water of a large dhund like islands, swarming with 

 Purple Herons and numerous other species of the same family that 

 had just begun to lay. In other parts of the Narra that had 

 become inundated earlier, Mr. Doig found nests at the end of June ; 

 but some of the colonies we observed were only building when we 

 left the district at the end of July. In one or two instances when 

 the nests were examined before the birds had laid, they deserted 

 the breeding-ground, carrying every stick of their nests off with 

 them." 



And he adds : " I found two colonies of Purple Herons num- 

 bering 20 or 30 pairs each at Milana, 18 miles E. of Deesa, on the 

 21st August, 1876. The nests were good-sized stick structures, 

 and built in a large bed of high bulrushes on the top of the 

 rushes. Unfortunately every nest contained young birds, some 

 three, some four. On the following day, 22nd August, I found a 

 single nest in an isolated clump of bulrushes growing in another 

 tank, containing four incubated eggs, which with considerable diffi- 

 culty I managed to blow." 



Colonel Legge remarks of the breeding of this species in Ceylon : 

 " I have found this Heron nesting on the shores of Bolgodde Lake, 

 in the Western Province, in December, and on the tanks in the 

 south-east of the island in February and March. It breeds in other 

 similar localities throughout the island. The nests in the first- 

 named place were made on huge screw-pines (Pandanus), the 

 leaves being beaten down at the origin of a branch, so as to form, 

 a platform on which the eggs were laid ; in the latter district the 

 nests were buil of sticks on bushy, thorny trees growing in a 

 partlv-dried tank near the celebrated temple of Tissa Maha Kama. 



"Around this tank and in similar trees growing in its muddy 

 bottom, hundreds of Herons, Ibises, Cormorants, Darters, Egrets, 

 Spoonbills, and Pelicans were nesting, and the din of the thousand 



