158 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ORNITHOLOGY OF INDIA. 



I find the following : — " I may note that I was upwards of two 

 years in the Andamans, and never either saw or heard of any 

 species of Collocalia building inside of houses, sheds, or the 

 like ; these species always build inside caves immediately on 

 the sea shore. ,J 



But since Colonel Tytler left the Andamans a change has 

 come over the spirit of their dream, and at the Settlement of 

 Port Blair they breed freely inside houses, both on Ross and 

 Chatham Islands ; the interior of the saw mills being the most 

 favorite haunt. There is another shed at Viper in which they 

 breed. This is quite in keeping with our experience of this 

 family elsewhere. 



There has been some grave error in regard to the nests of 

 this, the commonest of the Andaman, and Nicobar Collocalias. 

 I myself fully believe it to be linchi (c. f. Stray Feathers, 1873, 

 p. 294, et seq.), if not, it must stand as a finis, Tytler, but in 

 either case it does not make any of the edible nests. There is 

 no mistake about this, I have shot the birds and taken the nests 

 out of the caves, and Davison has done the same out of build- 

 ings where they had never been disturbed, and the nests are 

 in all cases similar, somewhat shallow, flat-bottomed half, or 

 two-thirds saucers, composed of brown moss, firmly agglutinated 

 with saliva; only along the line of junction with the place 

 of attachment is there a thickish film of unmixed inspissated 

 saliva, and that is brownish, not white. 



The white nests are made by spocliopygia, and probably also 

 by innominata (c. f. Stray Feathers, loc. cit.) The nests of 

 this species, linchi (or if distinct affinis) vary in size, but they 

 average about 1\ inches across, stand out from 1-^ to If inches 

 from the rock, or wall, and are about an inch deep ; they vary 

 from an eighth to more than a quarter of an inch in thickness. 



How often they breed I cannot say, but many of the nests, 

 which I found in a cave at the Little Jolly Boy, Macphei-son's 

 Straits, contained fresh eggs on the 9th of March. The eggs 

 are pure white, and entirely devoid of gloss, long ovals, very 

 obtuse at both ends, and some of them almost cylindrical, while 

 others again have a pyriform tendency. The eggs vary greatly 

 in length, viz., from 0'64 to 0"75, but much less so in breadth, 

 i.e., only 0*42 to 046. The average may be taken at 0*7 by 

 0-45. 



I must here note that Captain Beavan is altogether wrong 

 in what he says (Ibis, 1867) about this species, and he must 

 have written from hearsay. He remarks that the nest of this 

 species is considerably smaller, and perhaps whiter than that 



