According to Mr. Hodgson’s notes and figures, the Chestnut-throated Shrike-Tit breeds in Sikhim and Nepal up to an elevation of 6000 or 7000 feet.  The nest is placed at a height of 6 to 10 feet from the ground, between some slender, leafy, horizontal fork, between which it is suspended like that of an Oriole or White-eye.  It is composed of moss and moss-roots and vegetable fibres, beautifully and compactly woven into a shallow cup some 4 inches in diameter, and with a cavity some 2.5 in diameter and less than 1 in depth.  Interiorly the nest is lined with hair-like fibres and moss-roots; exteriorly it is adorned with pieces of lichen.  The eggs are two or three in number, very regular ovals, about 0.77 in length by 0.49 in width.  The ground-colour is a delicate pinky lilac, and they are speckled and spotted with violet or violet-purple, the markings being most numerous towards the large end, where they have a tendency to form a mottled zone.

243.  Aegithine tiphia (Linn.). The Common Iora.

Iora zeylonica (Gm.) et I. typhia (Linn.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, pp. 101, 103.  Aegithine tiphia (Linn.), Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. nos. 467, 468.

I have already on several occasions (see especially ‘Stray Feathers,’ 1877, vol. v, p. 428) recorded my inability to distinguish as distinct species Ae. tiphia and Ae. zeylonica.  I am quite open to conviction; but believing them, so far as my present investigations go, to be inseparable, I propose to treat them as a single species in the present notice.

The Common Iora (the genus, though possibly nearly allied, is too distinct from Chloropsis to allow me to adopt, as Jerdon does, one common trivial name for both) breeds in different localities from May to September.  I have taken nests and eggs of typical examples of both supposed species, and have had them sent me with the parent birds by many correspondents; and though both vary a good deal, I am convinced that all the variations which occur in the nests and eggs of one race occur also in those of the other.  If one gets only two or three clutches of the eggs of each, great differences, naturally attributed to difference of species (see Captain Cock’s remarks, infra), may be detected; but I have seen more than fifty, and, so far as I am concerned, I have no hesitation in asserting that, as in the case of the birds so in that of their nests and eggs, no constant differences can be detected if only sufficiently large series are compared.

The birds build usually on the upper surface of a horizontal bough, at a height of from 10 to 25 feet from the ground.  Sometimes, when the bough is more or less slanting, the nest assumes somewhat more of a pocket-shape.  Occasionally it is built between three or four slender twigs, forming an upright fork; but this is quite exceptional.