THE ISLANDS OF THE BAY OF BENGAL. 311 



The nestling however is quite different from these ; recently 

 we have obtained one killed on the 24th of July, not yet able 

 to fly properly. This has the head and nape (the crest very little 

 developed) and the entire upper parts including' wings and tail, 

 a dark brown almost black, everywhere more or less glossed 

 with a dull green metallic lustre, duller and more coppery on 

 the back, brighter on the coverts, secondaries, and ter- 

 tiaries, and very little apparent on the small portions of the 

 quills that have as yet emei'ged from their sheaths ; some of the 

 coverts, the secondaries, and tertiaries, narrowly margined with 

 ferruginous. The chin, throat, and neck sooty brown, with a 

 central stripe from the chin, down the front of the neck, caused 

 by a pale rufescent white streak or patch on each feather; 

 sides of the neck, each feather with a dull ill-defined central 

 ferruginous streak. Breast feathers, the same sooty brown, 

 each feather with a broad rufescent white shaft stripe ; abdomen, 

 vent, and lower tail coverts dusky, most of the feathers tino-ed 

 with pale ferruginous towards their tips ; axillaries sooty 

 brown with a faint coppery gloss. 



How soon this bird passes into the spotted plumage I am not 

 certain, but I believe about October or November at the first 

 moult. 



Davison remarks : — " Very common at the Andamans and 

 Nicobars ; found chiefly among the mangroves but occasionally 

 along the sea shore. It bi-eeds both at the Andamans and 

 Nicobars ; I shot the young at the Nicobars in the latter end of 

 February, and I shot a female at Port Blair in May which had in 

 the oviduct an egg almost ready for expulsion." 



933.— Ardetta cinnamomea, Gm. (1.) 



We only preserved one single specimen of this species, a 

 male in fully adult plumage which we shot at Tillang- 

 chong (Nicobars) in a little swampy fresh water pool. The follow- 

 ing were the dimensions of this specimen : — Length, 15 '5 ; 

 expanse, 21; wing, 5*7; tarsus, 1*7; bare portion of tibia, 

 0-7 ; bill, at front, 2'1. We shot the bird, but failed to pre- 

 serve it, at Preparis. 



934.— Ardetta sinensis, Gm. (4.) 



Specimens from the Andamans and Nicobars are brighter 

 colored than any that I have seen from the continent of India. 

 I have already fully described a specimen in this bright plum- 

 age, Stray Feathers, 1873, p. 308. In the Nicobars, we shot 

 a single specimen on a little fresh water swamp on Tillang- 



