The nests (almost invariably fixed in forks of slender boughs) are neat, compactly and solidly built cups, the cavities being deep and rather more than hemispherical, from 2.25 to fully 3.5 inches in diameter, and from 1.5 to 2 inches in depth.  The nest-walls vary from 0.5 to 1.25 inch in thickness.  The composition of the nest is various.  The following are brief descriptions which I have noted from time to time:—­

“Compactly woven of grass-stems and a few fine twigs, but with more or less wool, rag, cotton, or feathers incorporated; there is no lining.

“The nest was rather massive, externally composed of wool, rags, cotton, thread, and feathers, and a little grass; the cavity rather neatly lined with fine grass.

“Composed almost entirely of cobweb, with a few soft feathers, wool, string, rags, and a few pieces of very fine twigs compactly woven.  The interior was lined with fine straw and fibrous roots.”

Elsewhere I have recorded the following note on the nidification of this species:—­

“This bird, or rather birds of this species, have been laying ever since the middle of April, but nests were then few and far between, and now in July they are common enough.  The nest that we had just found was precisely like twenty others that we had found during the past two months.  Rather deep, with a nearly hemispherical cavity; very compactly and firmly woven of fine grass, rags, feathers, soft twine, wool, and a few fine twigs, the whole entwined exteriorly with lots of cobwebs; and the interior cavity about 13/4 inch deep by 21/4 in diameter, neatly lined with very fine grass, one or two horsehairs, shreds of string, and one or two soft feathers.  The walls were a good inch in thickness.  The nest was placed in a fork of a thorny jujube or ber tree (Zizyphus jujuba), near the centre of the tree, and some 15 feet from the ground.  It contained four fresh eggs, feebly coloured miniatures of the eggs of L. lahtora, which latter so closely resemble those of L. excubitor that if you mixed the eggs, you could never, I think, certainly separate them again.  The eggs exhibit the zone so characteristic of those of all Shrikes.  They have a dull pale ground, not white, and yet it is difficult to say what colour it is that tinges it; in these four eggs it is a yellowish stone-colour, but in others it is greenish, and in some grey; near the middle, towards the large end, there is a broad and conspicuous, but broken and irregular zone of feeble, more or less confluent spots and small blotches of pale yellowish brown and very pale washed-out purple.  There are a few faint specks and spots of the same colour here and there about the rest of the egg.  In some eggs previously obtained the zone is quite in the middle, and in others close round the large end.  In some the colours of the markings are clear and bright, in others they are as faint and feeble as one of our modern Manchester warranted-fast-coloured muslins, after its third visit to a native washerman.  In size, too, the eggs vary a good deal.