Mr. Wait, writing from Coonoor, says:—­“C. malabaricus builds a cup-shaped nest in small trees and bushes, and lays from three to five very round oval verditer-blue eggs.”

Captain Horace Terry says of this species:—­“Rather rare at Pulungi, but very common lower down on the slopes and in the Pittur valley.  I got a nest on April 5th at Pulungi with three incubated eggs, and on the 6th one with two incubated eggs, in the Pittur valley.  The last was built in a hollow in the top of a stump of a tree that had been broken off some ten feet from the ground.”

Mr. I. Macpherson writes from Mysore:—­“This bird is occasionally found with C. griseus in the bigger scrub forests, but its chief habitat is the larger forests.  Its breeding-season is much the same as C. griseus but unlike it, it does not select thorny bushes for building in, its nests being generally found in small trees or bamboo-clumps.  Four is the usual number of eggs laid, but five are often found, and the fifth I expect is frequently that of H. varius.”

Three eggs sent me by Mr. Carter from Coonoor, in the Nilghiries, are absolutely undistinguishable from those of Argya malcolmi.  Like these they are a uniform, rather deep greenish blue, devoid of spots or markings, and very glossy.  I do not think that, if the eggs of A. malcolmi, C. malabaricus, and C. terricolor were once mixed, it would be possible to separate them with certainty.  Other eggs taken by Mr. Davison are similar but slightly smaller, and, taking them as a whole, I think they average rather darker than those of the two species just mentioned.

The eggs vary in length from 0.93 to 1.02, and in breadth from 0.71 to 0.82; but the average of nine eggs is 0.97 by nearly 0.77.

111.  Crateropus griseus (Gm.). The White-headed Babbler.

Malacocercus griseus (Gm.), Jerd.  B. Ind. ii, p. 60; Hume, Rough Draft N. & E. no. 433.

I should say that the White-headed Babbler breeds all over the plain country of Southern India, not ascending the hills to any great elevation.  At the same time, many people would very likely separate the Madras, Mangalore, and Anjango birds, and insist on their being different species; but for my part, seeing how the birds vary in each locality and what a perfect and unbroken chain of intermediate forms connects the most different-looking examples, and that all the several races are separable from the other species of this group by their more or less conspicuously pale heads, I prefer to keep them all as C. griseus.

This species, thus considered, breeds apparently twice a year from April to June, and again in October and even later.

About Madras the nest is commonly placed in thick thorny hedges of a shrub locally known as “Kurka-puli,” said by Balfour to be Garcinia cambogia, but which does not look like a Garcinia at all.  The nest is a loosely-made cup, composed of grass-stems and roots, and the eggs vary from three to five in number.