“One morning, driving out near Bareilly, we found that a colony of the Bank Myna had taken possession of some fresh excavations on the banks of a small stream.  The excavation was about 10 feet deep, and in its face, in a band of softer and sandier earth than the rest of the bank, about a foot below the surface of the ground, these Mynas had bored innumerable holes.  They had taken no notice of the workman who had been continuously employed within a few yards of them, and who informed us that the Mynas had first made their appearance there only a month previously.  On digging into the bank we found the holes all connected with each other, in one place or another, so that apparently every Myna could get into or out from its nest by any one of the hundred odd holes in the face of the excavation.  The holes averaged about 3 inches in diameter, and twisted and turned up and down, right and left, in a wonderful manner; each hole terminated in a more or less well-marked bulb (if I may use the term), or egg-chamber, situated from 4 to 7 feet from the face of the bank.  The egg-chamber was floored with a loose nest of grass, a few feathers, and, in many instances, scraps of snake-skins.

“Are birds superstitious, I wonder?  Do they believe in charms?  If not what induces so many birds that build in holes in banks to select out of the infinite variety of things, organic or inorganic, pieces of snake-skin for their nests?  They are at best harsh, unmanageable things, neither so warm as feathers, which are ten times more numerous, nor so soft as cotton or old rags, which lie about broadcast, nor so cleanly as dry twigs and grass.  Can it be that snakes have any repugnance to their ‘worn out weeds,’ that they dislike these mementos of their fall[A], and that birds which breed in holes into which snakes are likely to come by instinct select these exuviae as scare-snakes?

[Footnote A:  “When the snake,” says an Arabic commentator, “tempted Adam it was a winged animal.  To punish its misdeeds the Almighty deprived it of wings, and condemned it thereafter to creep for ever on its belly, adding, as a perpetual reminder to it of its trespass, a command for it to cast its skin yearly.”]

“In some of the nests we found three or four callow young ones, but in the majority of the terminal chambers were four, more or less, incubated eggs.

“I noticed that the tops of all the mud-pillars (which had been left standing to measure the work by) had been drilled through, and through by the Mynas, obviously not for nesting-purposes, as not one of them contained the vestige of a nest, but either for amusement or to afford pleasant sitting-places for the birds not engaged in incubation.  Whilst we were robbing the nests, the whole colony kept screaming and flying in and out of these holes in the various pillar-tops in a very remarkable manner, and it may be that, after the fashion of Lapwings, they thought to lead us away from their eggs and induce a belief that their real homes were in the pillar tops.”