COLLECTING WAYS AND COLLECTING DAYS. 479 



liombill. I had finished my pipe and was looking at my day's collec- 

 tion, which consisted, besides birds, of some twenty butterflies and some 

 thirty wasps and bees, among the latter several specimens of the beautiful 

 Sphex erythropodafNhQTi the old Karen returned with the news that the 

 hornbiU's tree was about 400 yards off and easy of access ; also that the 

 female was on, or rather in the nest. Up I got and off we set. The 

 tree, like the one that contained the nest of the eagle, grew out of a rift 

 in the smooth perpendicular face of a wall of rock. But in this case 

 access to the tree could be got from above by letting oneself down 

 on to one of the branches by the help of a pendant root coming out of a 

 crevice in the rock at the top. The old Karen swung himself down 

 and, scrambling along the branch, reached a fork between the two large 

 branches into which the tree divided, and where in a hollow, the 

 entrance to which had been considerably narrowed by what seemed 

 to be hard clay mixed with broken leaves and other rubbish, sat the 

 female hornbill with only the tip of her bill showing. Using his heavy 

 dah (hatchet-knife), the Karen enlarged the entrance hole and rather 

 gingerly and with some difficulty, for she resisted stoutly, pulled the old 

 hen out, fluttering and squawking horribly. He was about to kill her 

 when, remembering that we were pretty heavily laden with speci- 

 mens, I called to him to let her go. I could see she was Rhiticeros 

 undulatus, the larger wreath-billed hornbill. She fell fluttering for a 

 few yards, and then, sailing off, perched on a neighbouring tree, not 

 seeming cramped in any way from her enforced confinement in the 

 nest. There were two perfectly fresh eggs resting, the Karen said, on 

 the bare wood in the hollow. These were soon in my hand, and 

 I found they were of a dull white colour and rather long in shape. 

 Having packed these, we went on following the crest of a long narrow 

 ridge. In about another hour we came to the site of an old nesting 

 place of the adjutants. There were about a dozen old abandoned nests 

 — some on the tops of low bushy trees, some on points of the bare rock. 

 The ground underneath and the leaves, branches and boles of the trees 

 around were white with the droppings of the birds, but of course at 

 this time of the year there was not an adjutant to be seen. A wall 

 of bare rock, some ten feet high, faced us, and this was covered with 

 the bulbs of that beautiful orchid, Limatodes rosea, none of which how- 

 ever were in flower. At our back lay the whole valley of the Ataran, 

 and the view stretched right away to the glistening gold pagodas on the 

 hill above Moulmein, up the Salween, with its numerous isolated lime- 



