ORNITHOLOGICAL NOTES FROM COCOAWATTE ESTATE. 315 



This concludes the list of species I have been able to identify during 

 the year. I have also met with a small brownish warbler once or twice 

 in short grass at 2,000 feet or so, which is new to me. It rises at your 

 boots, flutters jerkily for fifteen yards, and then drops like a stone into 

 the grass, and nothing on earth will induce it to show again. It has a 

 broadish tail, and is, I think, brown below as well as above. There is 

 no bird on the Ceylon list which this could be, except Lomstella 

 erthiola or Schoenicola platyura ; but S. platyura was added to the 

 Ceylon list on the strength of a single skin, history unknown, in 

 the British Museum, labeled " Ceylon : ex Cuming," and no ornith- 

 ologist in the island has met with it since. I must endeavour to 

 procure a specimen of my bird. The only information I can find 

 on the habits of S. platyura applies well to it, though the chances- 

 are against its being such a rarity. Whatever it may be, it is from 

 its extraordinarily skulking habits just the bird to be overlooked. 



I have also a note of a shrike seen at 1,000 feet in October, but not 

 procured: — "Body greyish, head quite gr3y with conspicuous black 

 eye stripe: certainly not L. cristatus, but about the same size. A pukka 

 Lanius of sorts." Would this be L. lucionensis, with which I am not 

 familiar ? 



I have once or twice seen a fine eagle on the wing which I take 

 to be Spizcetus kelaarti. 



Hydrophasianus cMrurgus^ I am told, straggles up to 1,000 feet here 

 occasionally, but I have not seen anything of it myself. 



