A nest of the Red-billed Crow-Tit was sent me from Native Sikhim, where it was found at an elevation of about 10,000 feet, in a cluster of the small Ringal bamboo.  It contained three eggs, two of which were broken in blowing them.

The nest is a very regular and perfect hemisphere, both externally and internally.  It is very compactly made, externally of coarse grass and strips of bamboo-leaves, and internally very thickly lined with stiff but very fine grass-stems, about the thickness of an ordinary pin, very carefully curved to the shape of the nest.  The coarser exterior grass appears to have been used when dry; but the fine grass, with which the interior is so densely lined, is still green.  It is the most perfectly hemispherical nest I ever saw.  Exteriorly it is exactly 6 inches in diameter and 3 in height; internally the cavity measures 4.5 in diameter and 2.25 in depth.

The egg is a regular moderately elongated oval, slightly compressed towards the smaller end.  The shell is fine and thin, and has only a faint gloss.  The ground-colour is a dull white, and it is sparsely blotched, streaked, and smudged with pale yellowish brown, besides which, about the large end, there are a number of small pale inky purple spots and clouds, looking as if they were beneath the surface of the shell.

The single egg preserved measures 1.11 by 0.8.

A nest sent me by Mr. Mandelli was found, he says, in May, in Native Sikhim, in a cluster of Ringal (hill-bamboo) at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet.  It is a large, rather broad and shallow cup, the great bulk of the nest composed of extremely fine hair-like grass-stems, obviously used when green, and coated thinly exteriorly with coarse blades of grass, giving the outside a ragged and untidy appearance.  The greatest external diameter is 5.5, the height 3.2, but the cavity is 4.5 in diameter and 2.2 in depth, so that, though owing to the fine material used throughout except in the outer coating the nest is extremely firm and compact, it is not at all a massive-looking one.

60.  Scaeorhynchus ruficeps (Bl.). The Larger Red-headed Crow-Tit.

Paradoxornis ruficeps, Bl., Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p. 5.

Mr. Gammie writes from Sikhim:—­“In May, at 2000 feet elevation, I took a nest of this bird, which appears to have been rarely, if ever, taken by any European, and is not described in your Rough Draft of ‘Nests and Eggs.’  It was seated among, and fastened to, the spray of a bamboo near its top, and is a deep, compactly built cap, measuring externally 3.5 inches wide and the same in depth; internally 2.7 wide by 1.9 deep.  The material used is particularly clean and new-looking, and has none of the secondhand appearance of much of the building-stuffs of many birds.  The outer layer is of strips torn off large grass-stalks and a very few cobwebs; the lining, of fine fibrous strips, or rather threads, of bamboo-stems.  There were three eggs, which were ready for hatching-off.  They averaged 0.83 in. by 0.63 in.  I send you the nest and two of the eggs.