1909.] ON THE NESTING OF THE TUFTED UMBRB. 885 



Swinhoe and pure silver hens, you will see that is so. Although 

 amongst many birds the j)himage of the young male often re- 

 sembles that of the adult hen of his species, yet in the case we 

 are considering, at no stage of his existence does the Swinhoe 

 cock put on the plumage of the adult hen of his species, and at 

 three months he has already assumed part of the adult male 

 plumage, though he does not appear in the brilliant full dress 

 until the following autumn. As the coupling of plumage and sex 

 is a pretty general rule, these facts seem to point to the Swinhoe 

 cock being possibly a heterozygote for sex. 



The following is the method I adopt in my breeding experi- 

 ments : — 



Birds are mated in Januai-y in a padlocked pen wired all round 

 and all ov'er, of which only the keeper and myself possess the 

 key. Each pen is numbered and recorded in a book with the 

 number of birds and their species. When gathering the eggs in 

 a pen these are marked with its number and dated before leaving 

 that pen. When the eggs are set under a hen the lid of her 

 sitting box is marked with the number of the pen from which the 

 eggs were gathered, the date of sitting, and number of eggs set. 

 When the chicks are hatched they are placed with the hen in a 

 coop with the pen number painted on it, having a small covered- 

 in run in front so that the chicks can never get away. 



At six weeks old the chicks are I'inged on the leg : the ring has 

 the year, the number of the pen, and the generation " F. 1 " or 

 " F. 2," stamped on it. This year they were also wing-labelled. 

 Records of all these matters are taken down in pencil in a note- 

 book at the pens with date of entry and copied into a large book, 

 tr four-year diary. 



Mr. D. Seth-Smith, F.Z.S., the Society's Curator of Birds, 

 •exhibited a photograph (text-fig. 280), taken by Mr. W. S. 

 Berridge, F.Z.S., of a nest of Scopus umbretta, and made the 

 following remarks : — 



A pair of South African Hammerkops or Tufted Umbres 

 belonging to the Society wei'e placed in the Great Flying Aviary 

 last spring, and forthwith commenced to collect sticks and any 

 rubbish they could find with a view to nest-building. They first 

 selected a site about ten feet from the ground on the top of a 

 small kennel-shaped box, originally fixed up as a nesting-box for 

 Xiaughing Kingfishers. Here they constructed a large platform 

 of sticks which they cemented together with nuid and commenced 

 to build a dome-shaped roof over it. 



Apparently they came to the conclusion that the site was not 

 a very suitable one, as they left this nest when about half finished 

 and selected another site, this time on the ground inside a, small 

 shelter shed some five feet in diameter. They built an enormous 

 dome-shaped nest in this, completely filling up the shed to a 

 height of about two feet six inches. But this did not suit them, 



60* 



