The late Captain Beavan tells us that “on the 16th of August, 1866, I found a nest in the garden, in a rose-bush, with four pale blue eggs in it, like those of Acridotheres tristis.  The nest is a large structure, firmly built of dry twigs, bark, sticks, ferns, and roots.  Another nest, with three eggs only, was found in a thick clump of everlasting peas close to the ground on the 6th of September.  The female sat very close, and this may have been the second nest of the same pair that built the nest mentioned above, as it was built not far from the first.”

Major C.T.  Bingham writes:—­“Being at Landour for a few days in May I chanced on a nest of this bird, perhaps the commonest in the hills.  It was placed under an overhanging bush on the side of Lal Tiba hill, and on the ground, being constructed rather loosely of pieces of the withered stem of some creeper, intertwined with a quantity of oak-leaves, and lined with grass-roots.”

The eggs, of which I must have seen some hundreds, as this is the commonest Laughing-Thrush about both Mussoorie and Simla, are typically regular and moderately broad ovals.  Abnormally elongated, spherical, and pyriform varieties occur; some are nearly round like a Kingfisher’s, and I have seen one almost as slender as a Swift’s, but, as a rule, the eggs vary but little either in shape or colour.  They are perfectly spotless, moderately glossy, and of a delicate pale greenish blue, which of course varies a little in shade and intensity of colour, but which is very much paler on the average than those of any of the Crateropi, and at the same time less glossy.  I am not at all sure whether T. lineatum is rightly associated with species like T. cachinnans, T. variegatum, and T. erythrocephalum, which all have spotted eggs.

In length the eggs vary from 0.8 to 1.13, and in breadth from 0.63 to 0.8; but the average of fifty-eight eggs carefully measured is 1.01 by 0.73.

101.  Grammatoptila striata (Vig.). The Striated Laughing-Thrush.

Grammatoptila striata (Vig.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii; p. 11; Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 382.

The Striated Laughing-Thrush, remarks Mr. Blyth, “builds a compact Jay-like nest.  The eggs are spotless blue, as shown by one of Mr. Hodgson’s drawings in the British Museum.”

A nest of this species found near Darjeeling in July was placed on the branches of a large tree, at a height of about 12 feet.

It was a huge shallow cup, composed mainly of moss, bound together with stems of creepers and fronds of a Selaginella, and lined with coarse roots and broken pieces of dry grass.  A few dead leaves were incorporated in the body of the nest.  The nest was about 8 or 9 inches in diameter and about 2 in thickness, the broad, shallow, saucer-like cavity being about an inch in depth.