an Blue Chat. Mr. Davison
found it on the Nilghiris. He says:--"I really quite forget the
details of that one egg which I brought you along with the skin of the
parent, but it was taken in May on the Nilghiris. I remember very well
another nest of this species, which I took in the latter end of March
or the beginning of April in a shola or detached piece of jungle about
9 miles from Ootacamund.

"The nest was in a hole in the trunk of a small tree, about 5 feet
from the ground, and was composed chiefly of moss, but mixed with dry
leaves and twigs. It contained three young birds, apparently about
four or five days old."

The late Mr. Mandelli sent me a nest of this species which was found
at Lebong (elevation 5500 feet) on the 16th May. It contained three
eggs, and was placed on the ground amongst grass on a bank made by
the cutting of a hill-road. It is a broad shallow nest, composed
exteriorly of vegetable fibre, scraps of dead leaves and tiny pieces
of moss matted closely together, and is rather thickly lined with
black and red hairs, amongst which one or two soft downy feathers are
incorporated. The external diameter of the nest is about 4 inches, the
height about 1.5, the cavity is about 2.75 inches in diameter, and
rather less than 1 in depth.

Two eggs taken by Mr. Darling[A] are very elongated, somewhat
cylindrical ovals, very obtuse at both ends. In both, the shell is
fine, and has an appreciable though not brilliant gloss. In one, the
ground is a pale delicate clay-brown, and the markings consist only
of a zone about 0.2 wide round the large end of densely set dull
brownish-red specks, and a few similar specks inside the zone only.
In the other, the ground has a light greenish tinge, the zone is less
marked and merges in a dull brownish-red mottled cap, and a faint
marbling, of a paler shade of the cap, is scattered here and there
over the whole surface of the egg. They measure 1 by 0.65 and 0.98 by
0.65.

[Footnote A: I cannot find any account of the finding of the nest of
this bird by Mr. Darling amongst Mr. Hume's notes.--Ed.]

The egg taken by Mr. Davison is an elongated, slightly pyriform oval.
The shell is moderately fine, but with only a very slight gloss. The
ground-colour is a pale slightly greyish green, and the whole egg is
thickly (most thickly so about the large end, where the markings are
almost perfectly confluent) mottled and streaked with pale brownish
red. It measures 0.98 by 0.67.