Nests and eggs of Indian birds : rough draft / by Allan Hume.

  • Allan Hume
Date:
1873
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Nests and eggs of Indian birds : rough draft / by Allan Hume. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    45/680 page 33
    4th of Januaiy; the other; from Kooloo; containing1 a single egg and taken on the 7th of the same month. Both nests were on ledges on the face of cliffs. Inde- pendent of other evidence, there is no other bird I believe in these districts that could have laid these eggs. In shape they are broad and nearly perfect ovals, very slightly, if at all, compressed towards one end. The shell is rather coarse and rough, quite devoid of gloss, and when looked into against the light, the egg appears of a peculiar light, slightly yellowish green. The eggs of the one nest are greyish white with only a very few brownish specks and spots towards one or other end; the single egg is richly blotched and mottled all over (most densely towards the small end) with somewhat brownish red, and is one of the hand- somest Eagle's eggs I ever saw. Although so different in colouring, the texture of the shell and its peculiar tint when held up against the light is the same in all the four eggs; and coming as they did from different localities and collectors, accompanied in each case by one of the alleged parents, I entertain little doubt of their authenticity. In length they vary from 2*5 to 2*68 inches, and in breadth from 1*88 to 2-02 inches. 33.—Pseudaetus Bonellii, Tern. Bonelli's Eagle lays, in the plains, in the latter half of December and in January; but in the Himalayas it sometimes lays, I believe, as late as April. The nest is usually placed on ledges of precipitous earthen or rocky cliffs, and in the plains I think preferentially in the immediate neighbourhood of some large river or jheel. I have repeatedly seen their nests in the high clay cliffs of the Jumna and Chumbal in the Etawah District, and I found a pair breeding in the ruined and Cyclopean walls of the ancient Togluckabad, south of Delhi. Many pairs were breeding in the precipices of the salt range near the Mayo Mines when I last visited these, and I found several of their nests in the rocky cliffs, overlooking the gorges of the Gaj and the Nurree Nai in the hills dividing Sindh from Kelat. Occasionally, however, they build on trees; and I found a nest containing a single egg in a large Peepul tree near Bhurtpore. The nest (as I said before, commonly placed on some convenient ledge or suitable recess in the cliff's face) is very large, from 4 to 6 feet in diameter, and is composed of thickish and moderate-sized sticks, varying from 1*5 to 0*5 inch in diameter. The nest itself varies in thickness from a few inches to a couple of feet, and being always finished off to a level, when placed, as often happens, on a more or less shelving declivity, is much thicker exteriorly than interiorly. In the nests that I have examined, branches and twigs of various kinds of thorny Acacias were the chief materials used. In no nest that I have seen, not even in that one mentioned as found on a Peepul tree, was there any very per- ceptible depression in the interior of the nest. In the centre of the platform, a circular space, of some 18 inches in diameter, is commonly smoothed over with a thin layer of green twigs; and in the centre of this again, a smaller space of perhaps 1 foot in diameter is carefully carpeted with green leaves, those of the Neem, Peepul, Peeloo (Salvadora persica), and other trees being apparently indifferently made use of. Normally, they lay two eggs, but I have once found three in a nest, and on two occasions have known of a single, much incubated, egg being met with. E
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