662 
DENDEOPHILA PEONTALIS. 
discover the 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 doion 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 j and in this situation I have not unfrequently 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 doAvn 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 Avill ; 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 an 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-red and somewhat pale purple.” An egg taken by 
Miss CockburiL measured 0‘68 by 0'55 inch. 
