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.

    663/680 page 651
    white glittering sands on which their eggs are deposited are often at noon-tide too hot to touch; and accordingly during the day-time the birds seem to trust to the heat of the sun to hatch the eggs, and are rarely to be found on their nests; they pass the time wheeling round and round above, or snoozing beside them. By night-fall every egg is covered by one or other of the parent birds, and when it is dark they sit so close that it is easy to catch them with a common butterfly net. I reproduce a couple of old notes on the nidification of this species: — a We procured numbers of eggs of this species on the 12th and 13th March in shallow circular depressions in low sand-bank islands of the Jumna near Sheregurh. Three was the greatest number that we found in any nest. The birds did not appear to have long commenced laying, as all the eggs were fresh. It is not amongst rocks or rocky reefs, where so many of the great Stone Plovers and Lapwings are nesting that we found its eggs, hut on bare low spots of sand from two to three feet above the present river level. On one occasion we found a solitary nest, but usually several pretty near together. On one bank, within a compass of a hundred yards, we found these, Hhynchops albicollis, the Black-bellied Tern, and Lesser Swallow Plover, all breeding, each species how- ever keeping pretty much to its own locality. The vigorous manner in which these Biver Terns attack and chase away Crows, Kites, and similar would-be- robbers from the immediate neighbourhood of their nests is very noticeable. To me they seemed to show more solicitude for their eggs than any of the other species breeding near them. It is impossible to doubt when they have eggs anywhere near; the way they flash backwards and forwards and wheel round and round overhead, incessantly repeating their shrill plaintive cry, at once reveals the existence of the treasures they are so anxious to preserve; but for this the search for their eggs would be weary work, as it is only when quite close to them that they catch the quickest eye, and I have myself seen ordinarily observant persons (not of course specially on the look-out for, or thinking of, eggs) walk right across a bank on which there were some fifty nests of this and kindred species, almost stepping on some, without ever noticing a single egg. The color of the eggs varies a good deal. Some have a pale green ground, in others this is stone color, in others cafe au lait color, and there are all kinds of intermediate shades. “ The markings are of moderate size and rarely thickly-set, though sometimes there is a tendency to form a zone near the larger end. They are brown, not dark, but varying in shade and tint according to the ground color, or possibly by contrast with it. There are also the usual secondary faint purplish brown blotches and markings, as if looking beneath the surface of the shell. Unlike the Stone Plovers and the Lapwings, the eggs of the same nest are not even com- monly of the same shade of ground and character of markings. Out of three eggs, two will be a pale warm brown and the third pale green, contrast- ing, as they lie side by side, so strongly that at first it seems difficult to believe that they belong to the same bird. Although even in shape they vary a good deal, still their general character is that of a round oval, rounder than those of Hhyncliops albicollis for instance. In this species I have remarked that the shortest eggs are the broadest, and vice versa, so that the cubic con- tents differ less than might be expected. The egg is somewhat glossy, more so than that of S. javanica. “ April 6t/i.—Revisited all these sand-banks, but found very few eggs : the great majority had clearly hatched off, and those we did find probably belonged to birds that we had robbed, since we found none on those banks where, having quite as many eggs as we wanted, we did not meddle with the nests we saw. 4 IC
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