Dr. Jerdon tells us that at Darjeeling he has repeatedly had the nest brought to him.  “It is large, made of leaves of bamboos carelessly and loosely put together, and generally placed in a clump of bamboos.  The eggs are three to five in number, of a somewhat fleshy-white, with a few rusty spots.”

I cannot but think that in this case wrong nests had been brought to Dr. Jerdon.  The eggs that I possess are all of one type—­rather elongated ovals with scarcely any gloss, and strongly recalling in shape, size, and appearance densely marked varieties of the eggs of Hirundo rustica, but with the markings rather browner and slightly more smudgy.

The eggs are typically rather elongated ovals, often slightly compressed towards the small end, sometimes rather broader and slightly pyriform.  The shell is extremely fine and compact, but has scarcely any gloss; the ground-colour is sometimes pure white, sometimes has a faint brownish-reddish or creamy tinge.  The markings are invariably most dense about the large end, where they form a zone or cap, regular, well defined and confluent in some specimens, irregular, ill-defined and blotchy in others.  As a rule these markings, which consist of specks, spots, and tiny blotches, are comparatively thinly scattered over the rest of the egg, but occasionally they are pretty thickly scattered everywhere, though nowhere anything like so densely as at the large end.  The colour of the markings is rather variable.  It is a brown of varying shades, varying not only in different eggs, but there being often two shades on the same egg.  Normally it is I think an umber-brown, yellower in some spots, but varying slightly in tinge, leaning to burnt umber, sienna, and raw sienna.

Other eggs subsequently obtained by Mr. Gammie are of much the same character as those already described, but one is a good deal shorter and broader, and the markings are more decided red than are some of the yellowish-brown spots observable in the eggs first obtained.

In length the eggs seem to vary from 0.76 to 0.8, and in breadth from 0.54 to 0.58.

Subfamily LIOTRICHINAE.

235.  Liothrix lutea (Scop.). The Red-billed Liothrix.

Leiothrix luteus (Scop.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p. 250.  Leiothrix callipyga (Hodgs.), Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 614.

The Red-billed Liothrix breeds from April to August; at elevations of from 3000 to 6000 feet, throughout the Himalayas south, as a rule, of the first snowy range and eastward of the Sutlej; west of the Sutlej I have not heard of its occurrence.  It also doubtless breeds throughout the hill-ranges running down from Assam to Burmah.

Mostly the birds lay in May, affecting well-watered and jungle-clad valleys and ravines.  They place their nests in thick bushes, at heights of from 2 to 8 feet from the ground, and either wedge them into some fork, tack them into three or four upright shoots between which they hang, or else suspend them like an Oriole’s or White-eye’s nest.