The eggs are typically rather elongated ovals, rather pointed towards the small end, but shorter and broader varieties, and occasionally ones with a pyriform tendency, occur.  The ground is a greenish or brownish white.  In some eggs it has none, in others a slight gloss.  Everywhere the eggs are finely and streakly freckled with a brown that varies from olive almost to sepia; about the large end the markings are almost always most dense, forming there a more or less noticeable, but quite irregular and undefined cap or zone.  In one or two eggs dull purplish-brown clouds or blotches underlie and intermingle with this cap, and occasionally a small spot of this same tint may be noticed elsewhere when the egg is closely examined.

12.  Urocissa occipitalis (Bl.). The Red-billed Blue Magpie.

Urocissa sinensis (Linn.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p. 309.  Urocissa occipitalis (Bl.), Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 671.

I have never myself found the nest of the Red-billed Blue Magpie; although it does breed sparingly as far east as Simla and Kotegurh, it is not till you cross the Jumna that it is abundant.  East of the Jumna, about Mussoorie, Teeree, Grurhwal, Kumaon, and in Nepal, it is common.

From Mussoorie Captain Hutton tells us that “this species occurs at Mussoorie throughout the year.  It breeds at an elevation of 5000 feet in May and June, making a loose nest of twigs externally and lined with roots.  The nest is built on trees, sometimes high up, at others about 8 or 10 feet from the ground.  The eggs are from three to five, of a dull greenish ash-grey, blotched and speckled with brown dashes confluent at the larger end, the ends nearly equal in size.  It is very terrene in its habits, feeding almost entirely on the ground.”

Colonel G.F.L.  Marshall remarks:—­

“The Red-billed Blue Magpie is, as far as I know, an early breeder at Naini Tal; common as the bird is I have only found one nest and that on the 24th April; it was a shallow slenderly built structure of fine roots, chiefly of maiden-hair fern, in a rough outer casing of twigs, placed on a horizontal bough overhanging a nullah about fifteen feet from the ground.  The tree had moderately dense foliage, and was about twenty-five feet high in a small clump on a hillside covered with low scrub at 5000 feet elevation above the sea.  Around the nest several small boughs and twigs grew out, and being very slight in structure it was not easy to see.  The old bird sat very close.  There were six eggs in the nest about half-incubated:  in two of them the markings were densest at the small end.  The egg-cavity was 6 inches in diameter by about 11/4 deep.  On the 5th June I saw old birds accompanied by young ones able to fly, but without the long tails.”