22 BRITISH BIRDS. 



step of their horses, like sand-lice on the sea-shore from a piece of seaweed 

 left by the tide." After they had passed they saw " a great globe in the 

 air, which suddenly turned, expanded, and, like a vast fan, descended to 

 the ground," which was in a few seconds covered with a moving black 

 mass, dappled with pink. After watching them for some minutes, the 

 party turned back and rode up to them. They rose quietly, but not till 

 they were close on them. So eager had the birds been in search of their 

 prey that not a locust was to be seen. At another place the party came 

 suddenly, after mounting a gentle ascent, on the crater of an extinct 

 volcano, full of water, and surrounded with basalt boulders. As they 

 approached, their attention was attracted by one of these nights of Rose- 

 coloured Starlings, which had alighted to drink, and which rose in alarm 

 and darkened the air overhead. At another place a solitary tree over a 

 well was so covered with them that the colour of the tree changed from 

 black to green as they approached and frightened the birds away. The 

 natives all declared the visits of these birds to be most uncertain and occa- 

 sional, and said that they had not met with them for three years. They 

 only see them on the spring migration, when their flight is always from 

 east to west. Canon Tristram adds that they were all apparently in full 

 breeding-plumage. 



The mystery which for some time shrouded the breeding of the Rose- 

 coloured Starling has been at length completely dispelled. The old 

 stories of their breeding in hollow trees, and the modern Greek or Bulgar 

 fables of their boring holes in banks like Sand-Martins, are entirely 

 unsupported by evidence. The Rose-coloured Starling is essentially a 

 Rock-Starling in its breeding-habits. When I was in the Dobrudscha in 

 the spring of 1883, 1 visited a village about three miles north of Kustendji, 

 where these birds had bred in great numbers the preceding year. They 

 had occupied a pile of rough building-stone, most of which was, unfortu- 

 nately, removed during the following winter. A small heap near a cottage 

 still remained, and I was informed by the peasant who lived there that it 

 had been full of nests. After removing a few stones from the top I soon 

 came upon the old nests. They were more carefully made than those of 

 the Starling, and might easily have been mistaken for nests of the Ring- 

 Ouzel they were chiefly composed of dry grass, but in several of them 

 a few feathers were interwoven. Mr. Barkley, in his ' Bulgaria before 

 the War/ describes two similar breeding-places between Rustchuk and 

 Varna, where thousands took possession of a mound of broken stone and 

 rock thrown out of a cutting on the railway. In several parts of the 

 Dobrudscha I met German emigrants from Bessarabia who told me that 

 the Rose-coloured Starling not unfrequently bred in thousands in the 

 peasants' gardens, which are surrounded by rough stone walls, in the holes 

 of which the nests aie made. These birds also often breed between 



