596 
Mr. G. L. Bates on the 
yellow margin of the gape, whicli together formed a con¬ 
spicuous yellow circle when the mouth was opened wide. It 
is a curious fact that this nestling’s stomach contained sand : 
as the young one had probably never been out of the nest 
before, the old bird must have procured it. 
The nest above referred to, and another nest brought 
with a sitting bird of this species and fragments of a 
broken egg, were little cups somewhat rudely built of fine 
fibres of dry bark of weeds or plantain leaf-stalks. 
Emberiza cabanisi. (Plate XI. fig. 11, egg.) 
Sharpe, Ibis, 1908, p. 342; Bates, Ibis, 1909, p. 54. 
The food of this Bunting consists of small grasshoppers. 
A young bird with the plumage half-grown (No. 4314) 
shews some interesting differences in coloration from the 
adult. The adult has a white throat, white wing-bars, 
white superciliary stripes, and white ends to the outer 
tail-feathers. The last character—that of the white in the 
tail—is common to all species of Emberiza , while the other 
white markings belong to this species alone, or to it and 
one or two others. These peculiar white markings of the 
species are replaced by brown in the young bird, while the 
outer tail-feathers are white as in the adult. 
A pair of these birds had a nest and reared their young 
in a bunch of plantains in full view of my house, though 
they were so shy that they were seldom seen. Two other 
nests were found and brought to me with the birds. These 
nests were shallow and loosely built of dried leaves and 
small stems, with a few finer fibres inside. One that came 
in situ on the branch was set in thick foliage. In one of 
the nests was the nestling above described ; in the other 
were two eggs (Nos. 452, 453) measuring 22 x 15*5 and 
21 X 15*5 mm. 
[These eggs are of a rather wide regular oval shape, and 
very slightly glossy. They are dull white, with long irregular 
fine scrawled lines and blotches of pale umber-brown and 
pale grey, most of the grey shell-markings being very 
indistinct.—W. B. O.-G.] 
