Captain Cock himself tells me that he “took several nests of this bird at Sonamerg in Cashmere in pine-forests.  It breeds in May and June, making a partially domed nest, which is sometimes placed low down on the bough of a pine-tree, sometimes on a small sapling pine where the junction of the bough with the stem takes place, and at other times high up on the outer end of a bough.  It lays five eggs, like those of P. humii only smaller.  The nests I found were all lined with feathers and thin birch-bark strips.  I never found a hair-lining in any of this bird’s nests.  The outer portions of the nest consisted of moss and lichen, arranged so as to harmonize with the bough on which it was placed.  The nests are compact little structures.”

Mr. Brooks, writing of the valley of the Bhagirati river, says:—­“Common in the alpine parts of the valley.  It breeds about Derali, Bairamghati, and Gangaotri, in the large moss-grown deodars.”

The eggs of this species closely resemble those of P. humii, but are smaller, and, to judge from a few specimens taken by Captain Cock that I have seen, they are somewhat shorter and broader.

Texture smooth, without any perceptible gloss.  Ground-colour pure white, spotted freely and principally towards the larger end with red:  brick-dust red would perhaps scarcely be a correct term.  The colour would be obtained by mixing a little brown and a good deal of purple with vermilion, or by mixing Indian red with a little Venetian red.  At the larger end they have an irregular zone of small, more or less confluent, spots and specks of this red, mingled with reddish or brownish purple, and a few specks and spots of the red scattered over the rest of the surface of the egg.

This egg may also be well described, as regards colour and mode of marking, by saying that it resembles the illustration in Hewitson’s work of the eggs of Parus cristatus, except that the egg of P. proregulus has a distinct zone of nearly confluent spots, and their colour is more of a brownish red than those shown in the plate above referred to, which by-the-by do not correctly represent the colour of the spots upon the eggs of P. cristatus which I have seen.  These spots are coloured with too much of a tendency towards crimson instead of brownish red.

Three of the eggs taken by Captain Cock varied from 0.53 to 0.55 in length, and from 0.43 to 0.44 in breadth.

416.  Phylloscopus subviridis (Brooks). Brooks’s Willow-Warbler.

Reguloides subviridis, Brooks, Hume, cat. no. 566 bis.

Colonel Biddulph remarks that this species is common in Gilgit at 5000 feet in March, April, May, and beginning of June, and that it breeds in the Nulter valley in July at 10,000 feet.  Young birds were shot in August fully fledged.

Major Wardlaw Ramsay observes on the label of a specimen procured by him at Bian Kheyl in Afghanistan in April, “evidently breeding”; and on that of another specimen shot in May at the same place, “contained eggs nearly ready to lay.”