200 W. Goodfellow—Familiar Birds of Singapore


and rapid-growing trees for shade purposes, they are beginning to

attract many more birds at any rate to gardens. It is a comparatively

new importation, and bears flowers and ripe fruit at the same time,

and there can only be at most a very short period in the year when

neither are to be found.


In April the Bulbuls commence to utter a new note, hard at first

to associate with them, a rather low “ Cluk cluk ” repeated most of

the day. This is the nesting note, and if the birds are watched they

are sure to be observed carrying materials into a bush. The nest is

not hard to find, once you hear this call. It is placed rather low down

in any thick bush, but never visible without looking for it. It will

contain two pinkish-white eggs, more or less heavily marked with

purple and brown around the base, but sometimes they vary

considerably.


There was in the heart of Singapore an old hotel recently demolished,

with a wide terrace along its front, greatly frequented from sunset to

midnight as an open-air cafe. A few bushes grew through the pave¬

ment at both ends, and in one of these not more than four feet from

the ground a pair of Bulbuls had built, and were sitting when I first

knew about them. The terrace was under a glare of arc lights, and

visitors’ chairs actually touched the bush within a foot of the nest.

It seemed impossible that the eggs would ever hatch out with so much

noise and disturbance, but they did, and the young were half-grown

when they were robbed, probably by one of the Chinese waiters who

first drew my attention to them. In the daytime, when the place was

quiet, I sometimes glanced in to see that all was well, and met the

bright eye of a parent bird sitting steadily and unafraid.


Only last year, in the garden yard of another hotel in the same

neighbourhood, there was a nest in the same kind of bush and about

the same height from the ground. One night at 10 o’clock an Indian

magician was giving an exhibition of being buried alive for a certain

period, and unfortunately they chose a site for the grave only about

a yard from the Bulbul’s nest. Many flashlight photos were taken,

and much excitement and commotion among people actually crushed

against the bush, yet in due course both eggs hatched, but the young

were killed later by a cat, I think, this time. These two illustrations



