270 BIRDS OF TENASSERIM. 



single specimen of bicolor either iu Tenasserim or the Malay 

 Peninsula. 



Nor can bicolor well be a stage of plumage, say the breed- 

 ing plumage of this species, as we have both sexes shot in 

 January, February, March, April, May, August, October, 

 November, and December, and what is more, Davison found the 

 nest just as he was leaving Bankasoon one time on the 23rd of 

 April, and the breeding birds were just like all the others. 

 Unfortunately the birds had not yet laid. The nest was a ball, 

 composed of dry reed leaves, about 6 inches in diameter exter- 

 nally, with a circular aperture on one side, very like that of 

 Mixornis rubricapiUa, and of Dumetia, and again not at all 

 unlike that of Ochromela nigrorufa, but placed in a bush 

 about 4 feet high and not on the ground. 



396 iter.— Malacopteron magnum, J3yton:(2). 



Pakchan: 



Confined to the neighbourhood of Pakchan. 



[A very rare bird in Tenasserim, and evidently only a strag- 

 gler just within our southern limit from further south. About 

 Malacca, where it is very common, I found that it kept to the 

 forests singly, in pairs or in small parties, hunting about in the 

 leaves and bushes in a desultory sort of way, and not in the 

 svstematic fashion that Cyanoderma and Alcippe do, though 

 of course this latter often or generally comes down to the 

 ground, which the present species, I think, never does. It has 

 not much of the habits of the Timaline birds, but more re- 

 sembles the Bulbuls in its deportment. So far as I am aware it 

 is solely insectivorous. — W. D.] 



The species that I have entered as magnum, of Eyton, is the 

 larger of the two nearly allied species, to which the name of 

 majus, Blyth, also applies. Count Salvadori and others have 

 assigned Eyton's name to the smaller species, reserving Blyth's 

 for the larger of the two. 



Two very nearly allied species occur plentifully in the 

 Malay Peninsula, where we have shot and sexed numbers of both, 

 but only the larger of the two occurs, so far as we yet know, in 

 Tenasserim. 



In both species the males are considerably larger than the 

 females ; but the females of the larger species are only a shade 

 larger than the males of the smaller species. The two species 

 however may, independent of other differences, be distinguished 

 by a glance at their crowns — the red feathers of the crown 

 being never, in either sex, black-tipped in the larger species, 

 while, in the smaller species, they are always so tipped in both 

 sexes. 



