The nest is a deep pouch suspended from several twigs, with the entrance at the top, and composed entirely of fine lichens woven or intervened into a thick, soft, flexible tissue of from three eighths to half an inch in thickness.  Externally the nest was about 31/2 to 4 inches in depth, and about 3 inches in diameter.

Family SYLVIIDAE.

363.  Acrocephalus stentoreus (H. & E.). The Indian Great Reed-Warbler.

Acrocephalus brunnescens (Jerd.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p. 154.  Calamodyta stentorea (H. & E.), Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 515.

Both Mr. Brooks and Captain Cock succeeded in securing the nests and eggs of the Indian Great Reed-Warbler in Cashmere.  Common as it is, my own collectors failed to get eggs, though they brought plenty of nests.

The nest is a very deep massive cup hung to the sides of reeds.  A nest before me, taken in Cashmere on the 10th June, is an inverted and slightly truncated cone.  Externally it has a diameter of 31/4 inches and a depth of nearly 6 inches.  It is massive, but by no means neat; composed of coarse water-grass, mingled with a few dead leaves and fibrous roots of water-plants.  The egg-cavity is lined with finer and more compactly woven grass, and measures about 13/4 inch in diameter and 21/4 inches in depth.

It breeds in May and June; at the beginning of July all the nests either contained young or were empty.  Four is the full complement of eggs.

Mr. Brooks noted in epist.:—­“Srinuggur, 10th June.  I went out early this morning on the lake here to look for eggs of Acrocephalus stentoreus, but it came on to rain so heavily that I only partially succeeded.  I took three nests, two with three eggs each, and one with four young ones, the latter half-hatched.  The eggs very much resemble large and boldly-marked Sparrows’ eggs.  They are smaller than the eggs of A. arundinaceus, but very similar.  The latter have larger clear spaces without spots than those of our bird.  I neither saw nor heard any other aquatic warbler.”

Later, in a paper on the eggs and nests he had obtained in Cashmere, he stated that this species “breeds abundantly in the Cashmere lakes.  The nest is supported, about 18 inches above the water, by three or four reeds, and is a deep cup composed of grasses and fibres.  The eggs are four, very like those of A. arundinaceus, but the markings are more plentiful and smaller.”

Captain Cock writes to me that “the Large Reed-Warbler is very common in the reeds that fringe all the lakes in Cashmere.  It breeds in June, builds a largish nest of dry sedge, woven round five or six reeds, of a deep cup form, which it places about 2 feet above the water.  It lays four or five eggs, rather blunt ovals, equally blunt at both ends, blotched with olive and dusky grey on a dirty-white ground.”