THE GAME BIRDS OF INDIA. 7 



great tendency to flake off in spots, specks, and even large blotches, as 

 the chicken develops within. Quite fresh laid eggs rarely exhibit any 

 white marks of any kind, while those more or less approaching hatching 

 (one cannot say incubation in this case) are invariably more or less 

 mottled with white. Occasionally fairly fresh eggs are dug out, bearing 

 along their entire length on one side, two parallel white lines made 

 apparently by the claws of the mother bird when scraping the sand over 

 them. The eggs are always a little pointed towards one end, and some, 

 especially the less cylindrical ones, are conspicuously so. The shell is 

 entirely devoid of gloss, and the surface is everywhere roughened with 

 innumerable minute pores which occur equally in the exterior coloured 

 flake, and the white somewhat less chalky shell beneath." 



'•' In length the eggs vary from 3-01" to 3-4", and in breadth from 1-90" 



to 2-25", but the average of 62 eggs I have carefully measured is 



3-25" X 2-07"." 



Reducmg Hume's meastirements in inches to millimetres we 



have a length between 76-4 and 85-3 mm., and a breadth between 



48-2 and 57-1 with an average of 82-5 x 52-5 mm. 



The question as to whether the old birds pay any further 

 attention to the young after they are hatched is by no means settled. 

 It is true that the young birds have been seen associating with the 

 full-grown ones, but it would appear that the young have been of 

 various ages, as one would expect, and that there have been gener- 

 ally more than two adult birds, which one would not have 

 expected. The young can fly directly they are hatched, for, as already 

 stated, they are born fully feathered, not covered with down, and if 

 sufficiently precocious to fly without being taught, why should they 

 not be sufficiently so to know how to feed themselves also. 



Butler says that he thinks the young birds find their way out of 

 the mound unaided by the parents, and remarks : — 



" For one thing the birds could never know — with eggs in different 



stages of incubation in the same mound — when to dig down to save a 



new hatched young one from suffocation ; further, the eggs can be 



hatched by packing them in a box in the material of the mound in 



which they are found, and Mr. E. H. Man, who hatched a chick on his 



verandah by this means, told me that it not only extricated itself from 



the sand, but flew up on the verandah railing directly it was approached." 



The eggs seem to be abnormally tough in constitution, for lieut. 



St. John records how some eggs which were taken away in buckets 



of sand were forgotten, the sand taken away and the eggs left 



exposed to open air and rain without any protection, yet of the 



dozen collected some five or six hatched out. 



Mr. St. John says that these young ones were fed entirely on 

 white ants, on which they thrived well. 



Habits. — Almost the only existing accou.nts of this bird and its 

 habits we owe to Hume and to Mr. J. Davison, who, for many years, 

 collected for him, and whom every writer on the Megapode has quoted 

 since Volume 2 of Stray Feathers was written. The latter says : 



" The Megapode never wanders from the seashore, and throughout 

 the day keeps in thickest jungle, a hundred yards or so above highwater 



