In Birds of the Plains I mentioned the sunbirds’ nest that was literally covered with the white paper shavings that are used to pack tight the biscuits in Huntley and Palmer’s tins.
“It is curious,” writes Mr. R. M. Adam, “how fond these birds are of tacking on pieces of paper and here and there a bright-coloured feather from a paroquet or a roller on the outside of their nests. When in Agra a bird of this species built a nest on a loose piece of thatch laid in my verandah, and on the side of the nest, stuck on like a signboard, was a piece of a torn-up letter with ‘My dear Adam’ on it.”
Mr. R. W. Morgan describes a yet more extraordinary nest that was built by sunbirds in an acacia tree in front of his office at Kurnool: “It was ornamented with bits of blotting-paper, twine, and old service stamps that had been left lying about. The whole structure was most compactly bound together with cobwebs, and had a long string of caterpillar excrement wound round it. This excrement had most probably fallen on to a cobweb and had stuck to it, and the cobweb had afterwards been transported in strips to the nest.”
The completed nest is a pear-shaped structure, with an opening at one side near the top. Over the entrance hole a little porch projects, which serves to keep out the sun and rain when the nest is exposed to them.
The nest is cosily lined with silk cotton. The aperture at the side acts as a window as well as a door; the hen, who alone incubates, sits on her eggs, looking out of the little window with her chin resting comfortably on the sill.
Two eggs only are laid. The smallness of the clutch indicates that there is not a great deal of loss of life in the nest. The immunity of the sunbird is due chiefly to the inaccessibility of the nest. The latter is usually at the extreme tip of a slender branch upon which no bird of any size can obtain a foothold. When a sunbird does make a mistake and place its nest in an unsuitable place, the predaceous crows devour the young ones, as they did recently in the case of a nest built in the middle of an ingadulsis hedge in my compound at Fyzabad.
In conclusion, I should like to settle one disputed point in the economy of the purple sunbird (A. asiatica). Jerdon stated that the cock doffs his gay plumage after the breeding season and assumes a dress like that of the hen except for a purple strip running longitudinally from the chin to the abdomen.
Blanford denied this. He appears to have based his denial on the fact that cocks in full plumage are to be seen at all seasons of the year. There is no month in the year in which I have not seen a cock purple sunbird in nuptial plumage. I used, therefore, to think that Blanford was right and Jerdon wrong.
Afterwards I came across the following passage by Finn in The Birds of Calcutta: “The purple cock apparently thinks his wedding garment too expensive to be worn the whole year round; for after nesting he doffs it, and assumes female plumage, retaining only a purple streak from chin to stomach as a mark of his sex. . . . I well remember one bird which came to the museum compound after breeding to change his plumage; he kept very much to two or three trees, singing, apparently, from one particular twig, and even when in undress he kept up his song.”
Since reading the above I have watched purple sunbirds carefully, and have observed that during the months of November and December cocks in full breeding plumage are very rarely seen, although there is no lack of cocks in the eclipse plumage described by Finn.