“They breed during April, May, and June, making a rather neat cup-shaped nest, which is usually placed in the bifurcation of a horizontal branch of some tall tree; the bottom of it is composed of thin dead leaves and dried grasses, and the sides of fine woody stalks of plants, such as those used by the White-cheeked Bulbul, and they are well plastered over externally with spiders’ webs; the lining is sometimes of very fine tendrils, at other times of dry grasses, fibrous lichen, and thin shavings of the bark of trees left by the wood-cutters.  I have one nest, however, which is externally formed of green moss with a few dry stalks, and the spiders’ webs, instead of being plastered all over the outside, are merely used to bind the nest to the small branches among which it is placed.  The lining is of bark-shavings, dry grasses, black fibrous lichens, and a few fine seed-stalks of grasses.  The internal diameter of the nest is 23/4 inches, and it is 11/2 inches deep.  The eggs are usually three in number, of a rosy or purplish white, sprinkled over rather numerously with deep claret or rufescent purple specks and spots.  In colours and distribution of spots there is great variation, sometimes the rufous and sometimes the purple spots prevailing; sometimes the spots are mere specks and freckles, sometimes large and forming blotches; in some the spots are wide apart, in others they are nearly, and sometimes in places quite, confluent; while from one nest the eggs were white, with widely dispersed dark purple spots and dull indistinct ones appearing under the shell.  In all the spots were more crowded at the larger end.”

Colonel C.H.T.  Marshall remarks:—­“Numerous nests of this species were found at Murree, agreeing well with Hutton’s description.  They breed in May and June, never above 6000 feet.”

The eggs are rather long ovals.  Typically a good deal pointed towards the small end, and more or less pyriform, but at times nearly perfect ovals.  They have little or no gloss.  The ground-colour varies from white, very faintly tinged with pink, to a delicate pink, and they are profusely speckled, spotted, blotched, or clouded with various shades of red, brownish red, and purple.  The markings vary much in character, extent, and intensity of colour.  There seem to be two leading types, with, however, almost every possible intermediate variety of markings.  The one is thickly speckled over its whole surface with minute dots of reddish purple, no dot much bigger than the point of a pin, and no portion of the ground-colour exceeding 0.1 in diameter free from spots.  In these eggs the specklings are most dense, as a rule, throughout a broad irregular zone surrounding the large end, and this zone is thickly underlaid with irregular ill-defined streaky clouds of dull inky purple.  In some eggs of this type, the smaller end is comparatively free from specks.  In the other type, the surface of the egg is somewhat sparingly, but boldly, blotched