322 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HIST. SOCIETY, Vol. XXI. 



curious taste for snakes and the , natives generally give it credit 

 for being a constant slayer and devourer of those reptiles. 



As regards the breeding season of Ewpodotis edivardsi it is not 

 easy to lay down any very definite period. Hume says : " The 

 Great Indian Bustard in U.pper India lays mostly in July and 

 August, but the breeding season varies a good deal according to 

 the rainfall, and we have found eggs as early as the first half of 

 March, and as late as the first half of September. In Southern 

 India, according to Jerdon, they lay during the cold season. 



" The eggs are placed on the ground, at the base of some bush 

 or tuft of grass, in a small depression, generally unlined, often 

 thinly lined with a few straggling blades of grass. The situation 

 varies ; sometimes the nest is in an open waste, sparsely dotted 

 with a few herbaceous shrubs, often in the stiibble of the giant 

 and bulrush millets, and still more often in clumps and patches of 

 high thatching grass, or the dense soft lemon grass so characteris- 

 tic of the favourite haunts alike of this Bustard and the Houbara. 



"My impression is, that the birds lay only one egg. But 

 sometimes two eggs are found pretty close together, and either the 

 females not unfrequently lay very close to each other, or when a 

 female does lay more than one egg, she deposits the second some 

 little distance from the first. Khan Nizam-ud-din Khan has taken 

 more than a hundred of these eggs with his own hand, and he 

 never found two eggs side by side. Where, as not unfrequently 

 happens, two are within a yard or two of each other, he believes 

 that they belong to different birds, and that this is a fact he has 

 in one or two cases proved by snaring both females. I have 

 only myself seen five nests, each containing a single egg. I can, 

 therefore, say nothing positive on this subject. 



" The eggs vary very much in size and shape. They are all 

 more or less oval, but while some are moderately broad and 

 slightl}'" pointed at one end, others are long ovals, exactly similar 

 at both ends, and others again are long and cylindrical, of the 

 same size and shape as the egg of the great Northern Diver, 

 figured by Mr. Hewitson ; and I have one specimen that, both in 

 colour, shape and size, might have been the one from which his 

 plate of the egg of the European Bustard w^as taken. The shells 



