The breeding-season lasts, according to locality, from April to October, but it never breeds with us in dry weather, always laying during rainy months.  Very likely at the Nicobars, where it rains pretty well all the year round, March being the only fairly dry month, it may breed at all seasons.

I have myself taken several, and have had a great many nests sent to me.  With rare exceptions all belonged to one type.  The bird selects a patch of dense fine-stemmed grass, from 18 inches to 2 feet in height, and, as a rule, standing in a moist place; in this, at the height of from 6 to 8 inches from the ground, the nest is constructed; the sides are formed by the blades and stems of the grass, in situ, closely tacked and caught together with cobwebs and very fine silky vegetable fibre.  This is done for a length of from 2 to nearly 3 inches, and, as it were, a narrow tube, from 1 to 1.5 in diameter, formed in the grass.  To this a bottom, from 4 to 6 inches above the surface of the ground, is added, a few of the blades of the grass being bent across, tacked and woven together with cobwebs and fine vegetable fibre.  The whole interior is then closely felted with silky down, in Upper India usually that of the mudar (Calotropis hamiltoni).  The nest thus constructed forms a deep and narrow purse, about 3 inches in depth, an inch in diameter at top, and 1.5 at the broadest part below.  The tacking together of the stems of the grass is commonly continued a good deal higher up on one side than on the other, and it is through or between the untacked stems opposite to this that the tiny entrance exists.  Of course above the nest the stems and blades of the grass, meeting together, completely hide it.  The dimensions above given are those of the interior of the nest; its exterior dimensions cannot be given.  The bird tacks together not merely the few stems absolutely necessary to form a side to the nest, but most of the stems all round, decreasing the extent of attachment as they recede from the nest-cavity.  It does this, too, very irregularly; on one side of the nest perhaps no stem more than an inch distant from the interior surface of the nest will be found in any way bound up in the fabric, while on the opposite side perhaps stems fully 3 inches distant, together with all the intermediate ones, will be found more or less webbed together.  Occasionally, but rarely, I have found a nest of a different type.  Of these one was built amongst the stems of a common prickly labiate marsh-plant which has white and mauve flowers.  There was a straggling framework of fine grass, firmly netted together with cobwebs, and a very scanty lining of down.  The nest was egg-shaped, and the aperture on one side near the top.  Mr. Brooks, I believe, once obtained a similar one; but the vast majority of the others that any of us have ever got have been of the type first described, which corresponds closely with Passler’s account.

Five is the usual complement of eggs; at any rate I have notes of more than a dozen nests that contained this number, and in more than half the cases the eggs were partly incubated.  I have no record of more than five, and though I have any number of notes of nests containing one, two, three, and four eggs, yet these latter in almost all these cases were fresh.