MBITATTELLTJS. 341 



board of every carriage passes over the bird's head), or on the top 

 of a hedge-bank, in an old brick-kiln, or in any well-drained situa- 

 tion ; in fact, a pair that had frequented my garden all the cold 

 season at Mynpooree laid on the top of my flat-roofed two-storied 

 house, and hatched their young there, and the second day had the 

 young down in the garden. How they carried them down the 

 forty feet from the parapet of the roof to the ground I could not 

 ascertain. These particular eggs had been kept in their places on 

 the flat roof by a circle of fair-sized pieces of mortar, heavy enough 

 to resist the strong winds which often in Upper India usher in the 

 rainy season. Very generally the eggs are laid in a simple depres- 

 sion in the earth, but not unfrequently the hollow is surrounded 

 by a little circle of stones or a little ridge of sand. I have seen 

 hundreds of nests but never one containing more than four eggs ; 

 and though people talk of finding six eggs in a nest, I confess that 

 I " hae mi douts." 



I quote here two out of many notes that I have recorded about 

 the nidification of this common bird : — 



" On the 13th March we found six nests on the Jumna, two 

 eggs in one nest and four in all the others. The so-called nests 

 were only nearly semi-spherical depressions in the sand (just large 

 enough to hold the four eggs), and were to a certain extent lined 

 with tiny pieces of flood-deposited wood fragments, straw, and 

 grass. It did not seem so much as if the nests were purposely 

 lined with this, as that the birds had chosen to make their nests 

 so as more readily to escape notice on one of the long dark lines 

 of such stuff deposited earlier in the year when the river was 

 higher, and now left some three feet above its level. The nests, 

 as I said, were depressions in the sand, but this sand was not part 

 of a mere open sandbank such as those on which we found the 

 Skimmers', River and Black-beUied Terns' eggs, but some collected 

 round and in amongst a large cluster of hard kunker rocks near 

 Keontra, and, although near the southern bank of the river, sepa- 

 rated from this by a channel and everywhere surrounded by water. 

 Within fifty yards we found a dozen nests of Esasus reeurvirostris 

 and Hoplopterus ventralis, and closer still on a spot of level sand 

 running out from the rocks a nest of Sterna seena. The eggs of 

 the Eed-wattled Lapwing were, some quite fresh, some partly in- 

 cubated ; and they are slightly larger, longer, and more pointed 

 than those of Hoplopterus ventralis. 



" Going along the line at Eta,wah for about three miles on 14th 

 August, we found five nests, one containing perfectly fresh eggs. 

 Pour of these nests were on the kunker ballast within two feet of 

 the rail, so that the footboard of the carriages of every train must 

 have passed over and within two feet of the sitting bird. The fifth 

 was on the top of the boundary bank, the bird sitting totally un- 

 concerned as our trolly passed within six or eight feet of it, and 

 only moving when I walked up to the spot. Brooks tells me that 

 along his fifty niiles of line he has seen at least one hundred nests 

 within the last twenty days or month," 



