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By Viiicent Legge, Esq., R. A. 



This handsome malkolia, one of our rarest birds^ is exclusively 

 a denizen of forest or larg-e secondary jung-le, and lias been 

 thoug-bt hitherto to inhabit only the western and south-western 

 districts of Ceylon. Layard notes it from the former part. 

 Annals of Natural History, 1854^ and speaks of it as veiy rare 

 and frequenting the tops of high trees. He says that he could 

 learn nothing of its habits or nidification from the natives. This 

 accords with my experience of aboriginal knowledge on the 

 subject ; in those districts where I have shot it, I have found 

 tlie natives quite ignorant al)out it, many of them never having 

 seen it before. This arises from the fact of its existing- in small 

 numbers and being at the same time very shy and wary and an 

 \\i\\Qh\tiiVii oi \hQ interior of the forest. At the same time I have 

 shewn the birds in my collection to intelligent natives and they 

 have recognized it ; nevertheless as I have shot it in company 

 with villagers, well up in the birds of their neighbourhood, but 

 who were totally ignorant abont it, it must be allowed that 

 taking its showy appearance into consideration, and the conse- 

 quent likelihood of its not escaping observation, it is one of our 

 rarest birds. Mr. Holdsworth in his Catalogue of Ceylon birds. 

 Proceedings, Zoological Society, page 433, 1873, says, he saw one- 

 flying across a road in the Central Province. This proves that 

 like many of our forest birds Centroi^ns chlororhynchus, Dicru- 

 russ lopliorhlnus, Toccus gingalensis, Clirysocolaptes StricMandi 

 and others, it extends its i-ange up to a considerable elevation. 



It has been lately my good fortune to procure Thmnicopliaus 

 pyrrhocephalus in the splendid forests between Anaradhapoora 

 and Trincomalie, a district which I was surprised to find very 

 Ceylonese in the character of its Avifauna, the same spot yielding 

 many island birds, such as Oreocincla spiloptera, Ruhigula mela- 

 nictera, XantJwloema ruhricapilla and Clirysocolaptes StricMandi, 

 the latter in numbers. It was nevertheless a matter of some 

 surprise to me to find this bird in the north of Ceylon, as I had 

 become wedded to the belief that it was very local and quite a 

 western inhabitant of our forests. It was as is usual, according 

 to my experience, in pairs. While watching the movements and 

 sprightly actions of a pair of JJissemurns malabariciis, one of these 

 birds flew on to the limb of a lofty forest tree under which I 

 was standing, and being partly obscured from my view by the 

 leaves of an under-growing tree, so that I could only clearly 



