The eggs of this species, which I have received from Kotagherry and other parts of the Nilghiris, are broad, nearly regular ovals, slightly compressed towards the lesser end; considerably elongated, and more or less spherical, and pyriform varieties occur.  The shell is fine, and has a slight gloss; the ground-colour is pale salmon-pink or pinkish-white, occasionally greyish white.  The whole egg is, as a rule, finely speckled, spotted, and splashed with pinkish brown or brownish pink.  The markings, in most eggs, everywhere very fine, are often considerably more dense at the large end, where they are not unusually more or less underlaid by a pinkish cloud, with which they form an irregular ill-defined and inconspicuous cap.

At times more boldly and richly marked eggs are met with; one now before me is everywhere thickly streaked with dull pink, in places purplish, and over this is thinly but rather conspicuously spotted and irregularly blotched (the blotches being small however) with light burnt sienna-brown.

In length they vary from 1.18 to 1.48 inch, and in breadth from 0.92 to 1 inch.

191.  Larvivora brunnea, Hodgs. The Indian Blue Chat.

Larvivora cyana, Gould, Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p. 145; Hume, Rough Draft
N. & E. no. 507.

I have never obtained the nest of the Indian Blue Chat.  Mr. Davison found it on the Nilghiris.  He says:—­“I really quite forget the details of that one egg which I brought you along with the skin of the parent, but it was taken in May on the Nilghiris.  I remember very well another nest of this species, which I took in the latter end of March or the beginning of April in a shola or detached piece of jungle about 9 miles from Ootacamund.

“The nest was in a hole in the trunk of a small tree, about 5 feet from the ground, and was composed chiefly of moss, but mixed with dry leaves and twigs.  It contained three young birds, apparently about four or five days old.”

The late Mr. Mandelli sent me a nest of this species which was found at Lebong (elevation 5500 feet) on the 16th May.  It contained three eggs, and was placed on the ground amongst grass on a bank made by the cutting of a hill-road.  It is a broad shallow nest, composed exteriorly of vegetable fibre, scraps of dead leaves and tiny pieces of moss matted closely together, and is rather thickly lined with black and red hairs, amongst which one or two soft downy feathers are incorporated.  The external diameter of the nest is about 4 inches, the height about 1.5, the cavity is about 2.75 inches in diameter, and rather less than 1 in depth.

Two eggs taken by Mr. Darling[A] are very elongated, somewhat cylindrical ovals, very obtuse at both ends.  In both, the shell is fine, and has an appreciable though not brilliant gloss.  In one, the ground is a pale delicate clay-brown, and the markings consist only of a zone about 0.2 wide round the large end of densely set dull brownish-red specks, and a few similar specks inside the zone only.  In the other, the ground has a light greenish tinge, the zone is less marked and merges in a dull brownish-red mottled cap, and a faint marbling, of a paler shade of the cap, is scattered here and there over the whole surface of the egg.  They measure 1 by 0.65 and 0.98 by 0.65.