“These birds closely resemble Chaetornis striatus in their actions and habits, and in the breeding-season rise constantly into the air, chirruping like that species, and descending afterwards in the same way on to some low bush or tussock of grass, sometimes even on to the telegraph-wires.  They are fearful little skulks, however, if you attempt to pursue them, and the moment you approach disappear into the grass like a shot, from whence it is almost impossible to flush them again unless you all but tread on them.  It is perfectly marvellous the way they will hide themselves in a patch of grass when they have once taken refuge in it; and although you may know within a yard or two of where the bird is, you may search for half an hour without finding it.  If you shoot at them and miss, they drop to the shot into the grass as if killed, and nothing will dissuade you from the belief that they are so until, after a long search, the little beast gets up exactly where you have been hunting all along, from almost under your feet, and darts off to disappear, after another short flight of fifteen or twenty yards, in another patch of grass, from whence you may again try in vain to dislodge it.”

The eggs of this species, though much smaller, are precisely of the same type as those of Megalurus palustris and Chaetornis striatus; moderately broad ovals with a very fine compact shell, with but little gloss, though perhaps rather more of this than in either of the species above referred to.  The ground-colour is white, with perhaps a faint pinkish shade, and it is profusely speckled and spotted with brownish red, almost black in some spots, more chestnut in others.  Here and there a few larger spots or small irregular blotches occur.  Besides these markings, clouds, streaks, and tiny spots of grey or lavender-grey occur, chiefly about the large end, where, with the markings (often more numerous there than elsewhere), they form at times a more or less confluent but irregular and ill-defined cap.

One egg measured 0.73 by 0.6.

391.  Acanthoptila nepalensis (Hodgs.). The Spiny Warbler.

Acanthoptila nipalensis (Hodgs.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p 57.  Acanthoptila pellotis, Hodgs., Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 431 bis.

According to Mr. Hodgson’s notes and figures, this species builds, in a fork of a tree, a very loose, shallow grass nest.  One is recorded to have measured 4.87 in diameter and 1.75 in height externally, and internally 3.37 in diameter and an inch in depth.  The eggs are verditer-blue, and are figured as 1.1 by 0.65.

I may here note that Acanthoptila pellotis and A. leucotis are totally distinct, as Mr. Hodgson’s figures clearly show.  Hodgson published A. leucotis apparently under the name of A. nipalensis, so that the two will stand as A. pellotis and A. nipalensis.[A]

[Footnote A:  I do not agree with.  Mr. Hume on this point.  It seems to me that this bird has both a summer and a winter plumage, and Hodgson’s two names refer to one and the same bird.—­ED.]