562 DENDROPHILA FRONTALIS. 



discover tlie tiny little birds, so difficult are they to discern in the gloom against the sombre-coloured bark. 

 While searching for its food it frequently runs down the bark as well as up and across it, locomotion in any 

 direction being alike easily performed by it ; it may likewise just as often be seen running along fallen logs 

 or over small dead wood lying on the ground ; and in this situation I have not unfrcqueutly observed it near 

 paths and cart-tracks in the forest. It must, during some portion of the day, rest from its labours ; but I 

 have never succeeded in finding it in a state of quiescence. 



Mr. Davison writes of it as follows : — " They are always busy working up and down and round and round 

 the branches of trees, standing and fallen, sometimes even foraging in brushwood, always, like the rest of the 

 Sittas, coming down head foremost, never tail foremost, as some Woodpeckers will ; feeding exclusively on 

 insects ; often hammering away at the bark and constantly uttering a sharp chick, chick, chick, rapidly repeated 

 as they work about, but not as they fly." 



Besides this well-known sound in the Ceylon forests I have heard the males utter a short little warble, 

 with which they answer one another while feeding. 



Nidification. — I am unable to give any particulars of this bird's nesting in Ceylon. In India Mr. Thompson 

 notes it as breeding in the Kumaon forests, where it is common in May and June. Mr. Davison has found 

 its nest at Ootacamund in April, and Miss Cockburn at Kotagherry as early as the 10th of February. It 

 builds in a small hole in a tree, a natural cavity in itself, but with the entrance, according to Mr. Hume, 

 trimmed by the bird. The nest, a compact structure, is made of moss and moss-roots, and lined with feathers 

 and hair. 



Miss Cockburn has au interesting note, in ' Nests and Eggs,' on the finding of one of these nests, in which, 

 among other details, she describes the manner in which the parent bird entered its nest ; she writes to 

 Mr. Hume, after describing an inquisitive visit of a Titmouse to the opening, which he found too small and 

 soon flew away from : — " I continued to watch, and was quite repaid by seeing a Velvet-fronted Nuthatch fly 

 to the top of a tree containing the nest [the italics are mine] and descend rapidly down the trunk, which was 

 about 12 or 13 feet high, knowing well where the nest-hole was, and disappear into it." 



The eggs are three or four in number, white, " blotched, speckled, and spotted, chiefly, however, in a 

 sort of irregular zone round the large end, with brickdust-rcd and somewhat pale purple." An egg taken by 

 Miss Cockburn measured - G8 by 055 inch. 



