" The male varies much, and does not appear to attain the nuptial dress till after Christmas, 

 which he loses again in the summer. Not more than one in four of the males we shot in January 

 was in full plumage, the brilliant metallic reflections of the back, throat, and breast being inter- 

 rupted by many brown feathers ; and I have several times taken birds who have paired, and were 

 breeding, in this incomplete livery. We ascertained that this state of plumage is certainly not 

 the mark of immature birds, as it is always accompanied by the bright axillary tufts, which the 

 young birds do not acquire till after their first moult, prior to which they have the sombre dress 

 of the female, but with a lighter-coloured breast. 



" As we crept along the western shores of the Dead Sea, we met with a few pairs up the 

 different Wadys where water remained ; but here, deprived of cover, they are extremely shy and 

 wary. In the Ghor es Safleh, under Kerak (the richest and hottest portion of the whole Ghor), 

 the Sun-birds were as numerous as at Jericho. On our return we found them plentiful by the 

 wooded banks of the Jordan, but never far removed from the banks. In the month of March 

 we ascertained their summer range to be more extensive than we had expected ; for one day, 

 while shooting on the south side of Mount Carmel, on the slopes which run down to the Plain of 

 Sharon, Mr. Bartlett declared he heard their notes ; and after a long pursuit, I secured a pair 

 close to the edge of the plain, not far from the sea. This was the only occasion on which the 

 bird ever occurred to us away from the Jordan valley ; but I have reason to believe it has been 

 obtained in Asia Minor, as a French collector at Smyrna described to me a bird he had once 

 received from the interior, which could only, I think, have been a female Sun-bird. 



"A few days after our visit to Carmel we again met with the Sun-bird in a deep gorge, the 

 Wady Hamam, opening onto the plain of Gennesaret. Mr. Cochrane and I pursued it in vain ; 

 but, while searching among the cliffs for Vultures' nests, Mr. Cochrane pulled down from the 

 extremity of the twig of a hyssop-plant what he imagined to be an old nest of JDrymoeca gracilis. 

 It had the external appearance of a loose ball of rubbish, such as might have been floated down 

 by a sudden flood and caught in a bough of a tree. After tossing it about for some time, he 

 threw it to me ; and on examining it I was dismayed to find it a fresh nest, very firm, and compact 

 inside, with a small hole in the side, and containing two broken fresh eggs, elongated, of a 

 greenish white, with a zone of darker green-grey spots near the larger end. On the 23rd of May 

 I returned to the same place, and while climbing up to a cave, the resort of ffirundo rufula, I 

 struck with my head a little ball of straw and leaves attached to the extremity of a castor-oil 

 plant, not two yards from the spot where Mr. Cochrane had found his nest. It contained three 

 eggs, quite fresh, and was beautifully shaded both from the sun and from observation. Close by 

 was another nest, from which the young had been reared ; and we watched the female feeding 

 the young family of three in the hyssop overhead. I am inclined to believe that they had bred 

 twice ; for we could not make out a third pair. 



" Meanwhile I had returned, in April, to our old quarters at Ain Sultan, near Jericho. On 

 the afternoon of my arrival, on the loth of April, I discovered by myself no less than seven nests 

 — one with three eggs, one with two hard-set, one building, and four with young. All were in 

 precisely similar situations, suspended from the extremity of a small twig hanging down in the 

 centre of a ' nubk ' tree, whose thorny branches spread in a circle so close to the ground that I 

 had in every instance to creep on all fours -till I could get under the trees. The nests in these 



