144 ADDITIONAL NOTES ON THE BIRDS OF TENASSERIM 



39 ter.— Spilornis rutherfordi, Swinh. 



Wlierever there is a quin {i.e., marsh) or large patches of 

 wet paddy cultivation, a pair of these Harrier Eagles are 

 almost certain to be found. 



It is very common in the Thoungyeen valley, where, on the 

 14th March this year, I revisited a nest I had had marked down 

 for me in February, and took from it a solitary egg measuring 

 2*57 by 2'08 — in fact rather a broad oval of a dull white 

 ground, blotched, clouded, and dashed with pale purple and. 

 rusty red, the purple forming a dull cap of irregular shape 

 over nearly half the egg at the larger end. The nest, which was 

 placed some 70 feet up a Kanyin tree (Dipterocarpus 

 alatus), was composed of large branches, laid across in a 

 fork, with a superstructure of small sticks intertwined in a 

 circular form, and the hollow in which the egg reposed lined 

 with very fine twigs ; the whole mass may have been some 

 three and a half feet in diameter and one and a half feet thick. 



A young bird I procured on the Zammee choung, Attaran 

 river on the 15th January 1879, was just beginniug to get the 

 peculiar white-mottled brown feathers on the lower portion of 

 the stomach, the centre of the latter, chin and throat pure 

 white; the breast white, with some of the feathers brown-cen- 

 tred on one side of the shaft. 



41.— Polioaetus ichthyaetus, Borsf. 



A bird much oftener seen than shot. It is quite common 

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

 Zammee and Winyeo 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, 1 have not, 

 etrange to say, 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 

 Thoungyeen 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 



