Major C.T.  Bingham tells us:—­“Between the 12th and 31st March this year I found ten nests of this bird, which is very common in the grass-covered land of the Jumna.  These nests were all alike, of fine dry grass mixed with the down of the surpat, which also thickly lined the inside.  In shape the nests are blunt ovals, with a tiny hole for entrance a little above the centre.  Seven out of the ten nests contained four eggs each, the rest three each.  The eggs in colour are a pale yellowish white with a tinge of green, thickly speckled with dashes rather than spots of rusty red, tending in some to form a cap, in others a zone round the large end.  The average of twenty eggs measured is 0.53 by 0.44 inch.  The nests were all, with one exception, supported by stems of the grass being worked into the sides.  The one exception was a nest I found in the fork of a tamarisk bush.  It is not a difficult nest to find, for when you are in the vicinity of one, one of the birds will flit about the stems of the surrounding clumps of grass and above you freely, opening its tiny mouth absurdly wide, but giving forth the feeblest of feeble sounds.”

Writing on the Avifauna of Mt.  Abu and N. Guzerat, Colonel E.A.  Butler says:—­“I found a nest in a tussock of coarse grass in the sandy bed of a river, amongst a number of tamarisk-bushes, on the 8th July, 1875, in the neighbourhood of Deesa.  It was composed of fine dry fibrous roots and grass-stems exteriorly, and lined with silky vegetable down.  It was a long bottled-shaped structure with a small entrance on one side.  The nest, eggs, situation, locality, &c. all agree so exactly with the descriptions quoted by Dr. Jerdon and with Mr. Anderson’s note in ‘Nests and Eggs,’ Rough Draft, that I should have found it difficult to avoid copying these two gentlemen in describing my own nest.

“The nest contained three hard-set eggs and one young one just hatched.”

Referring to its occurrence in the Eastern Narra District, Mr. Doig tells us:—­“This little Warbler is very common.  I took the first nest in March and again in May; they build in stunted tamarisk-bushes; the nest is circular dome-shaped, with the entrance on one side the top, the inside being very beautifully and softly lined with the pappus of grass-seeds.  Four is the usual number of eggs in one nest.”

The Blackbird type of egg above described is by no means the commonest one; the great mass of the eggs have the ground greyish, greenish, or pinkish white, and they are very thickly and finely freckled and speckled all over, but most densely about the large end, with a slightly brownish, rarely a slightly purplish grey.  Occasionally when the markings are very dense in a cap at the large end there is a distinct purplish-grey tinge there, and on the rest of the surface of the egg the markings are somewhat less thickly set, leaving small portions of the ground-colour clearly visible.  Typically the eggs are moderately broad ovals, a little compressed towards the small end, and though none are very glossy, the great majority have a fair amount of gloss.