Dr. Scully, writing also from Nepal, says:—­“During the breeding-season (May and June) this Minivet is found in forests on the hills up to an elevation of 7500 feet.  A nest was found in the Sheopoori forest on the 17th June, which contained two very young birds and one egg.”

The eggs of this species that I have seen are moderately broad ovals, as a rule, very regular in their shape, and scarcely compressed at all towards the lesser end.  The shell is fine and satiny, but the eggs have little or no real gloss.  The ground-colour is a dull white, sometimes slightly tinged with pink, sometimes with green, and they are richly and profusely blotched, spotted, and streaked, most densely, as a rule, towards the large end, with brownish red and pale purple.  Most eggs exhibit a more or less conspicuous, though irregular, zone round the larger end.

The eggs vary in length from 0.71 to 0.8 inch, and in breadth from 0.54 to 0.6 inch.

499.  Pericrocotus roseus (Vieill.). The Rosy Minivet.

Pericrocotus roseus (Vieill.), Jerd.  B. Ind. i, p. 422; Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 275.

The only one of my contributors who appears to have taken the eggs of the Rosy Minivet is Colonel C.H.T.  Marshall.  Mr. R. Thompson says:—­“They breed in the warmer valleys of Kumaon, up to an elevation of some 5000 feet, in May and June;” but he adds:  “have never got down the nests.”

Colonel Marshall, writing from Murree, says:—­“The Rosy Minivet builds a beautifully little shallow cup-shaped nest, the outer edge being quite narrow and pointed.  The external covering of the nest is fine pieces of lichen fastened on with cobwebs.  It was found on the 12th of June, and contained three fresh eggs, white, with greyish-brown spots and blotches sparsely scattered about the larger end; the length is 0.8 by 0.55 inch; 5000 feet up.”

The nest, which I owe to this gentleman, is externally a short section of a cylinder, rather than a cup, the walls standing up outside almost perpendicularly.  It is 2.5 inches in diameter and nearly 1.75 in height.  The rim of the nest is 1/4 inch wide, and the cavity, a shallow cup, 2 inches wide by scarcely an inch deep; the walls of the nest increase in thickness as they approach the base.

Externally the whole surface is entirely covered by small scales of lichen, firmly bound into their respective places by gossamer threads; internally the nest is a very loosely put together basket-work of excessively fine twigs and grass-stems not thicker than common needles.  A morsel or two of moss have become involved in the fabric, as well as two fine blades of grass; but there is no lining, and the eggs are obviously laid upon the soft loose basket frame of the nest.

The egg which accompanied the nest is a regular oval, slightly compressed towards one end.  The ground-colour is pale greenish white entirely devoid of gloss.  The egg is richly blotched, spotted, and speckled (most densely so towards the larger end) with reddish brown and greenish purple, there being two conspicuously different shades (a much darker and a much lighter, the latter of which appears like subsurface tints) of each of these colours.  This egg measures 0.82 by 0.6 inch nearly.