NATURAL HISTORY NOTES 
171 
hopping about in the hedge-bottom in a very guilty fashion. 
This cuckoo is as large as a kestrel and has a very hawk-like 
appearance, they are locally called bush crows. I looked up 
a book of South African birds, and find that its Cape repre- 
sentative is credited with building a nest for, and raising its 
own young. 
In an old weaver bird’s nest in a very thorny shrub, 
I found five eggs of the sociable weaver-finch ( Syermestes 
scutatus ) ; two eggs were perfectly fresh, two were perfectly bad, 
so much so that they exploded on being pricked with a pin ; the 
fifth was empty with a very small hole in its side, such as might 
have been made by a bird’s claw, and the contents removed 
by ants. The eggs are the size of a tom-tit’s, but oval, neither 
pole being larger than the other ; colour pure-white, but tinted 
pink by the presence of the yolk before being blown. The 
bird is no larger than one’s thumb and is one of a group of small 
weavers which a friend aptly terms 4 animated-plums,’ many 
of them being plum-coloured. The species under consideration 
has a black cap, and several lay in one nest. 
Egg-collecting here is extremely interesting, as you have 
to wait and watch for the bird and then identify it from notes 
or memory from the collection of skins in the Museum. There 
are no books on either the birds or eggs of this Protectorate. 
I found about ten nests containing eggs (four, five, or six 
in a nest) in a black wattle plantation. The nests are like 
those of very untidy wrens and all built of one kind of grass 
still green. My host had a splendid show of asters, about 
which hovered a host of handsome clearwing humming-bird 
hawk-moths ; many of the blooms had the centres eaten away 
by large chafer beetles ; there were also a number of small 
ones of a bright green. 
May 29. — In the long grass on the plains I found three 
nests of the red-necked weaver ( G . laticauda) each with a 
clutch of three eggs. Three seems to be the favourite number 
with the weavers. I have just noticed in Pouchet’s 4 Marvels 
of the Universe’ a full-page illustration of the nest of the 
African sociable weaver, in the foreground are two deer, 
apparently elk, drinking from a swamp. They must have 
been imported for artistic reasons. A similar howler is in a 
