ARDEA PURPUREA. 1135 



The young remain long about the nest before flying, perching on the branches of trees close to their nests; 

 but they are likewise to be seen about the tanks when they are scarcely able to fly, and then skulk among 

 the brushwood like Bitterns. Writing of the nidification of this species in India, Mr. Hume remarks that he 

 has invariably found the nests in thick beds of reeds or bulrushes. In a large jheel in the Etawah district, 

 where a number of nests were found by him in August, they were made on platforms of bulrushes, thirty or 

 forty blades being bent down to form the platform, about 2 feet above the water, on which the nests, composed 

 of sticks and twigs of Babool- and Sheeshum-trees, were constructed ; they were loose flat structures from 

 2 to 2^ feet in diameter. Some of the nests contained as many as five eggs. " The uproar," he writes, 

 " was great whilst the men were robbing their nests ;' and the extraordinary chattering that the birds made, 

 condoling with each other, when on reoccupying the nests they found them empty, was most comical.'''' 

 Mr. Hume's measurements for the eggs are — length 1-95 to 2"46, breadth 1*43 to l"75inch. 



