Page:The Common Birds of Bombay.djvu/54

38 feather on each side prolonged for four or five inches and as thin as a fine wire. This bird makes its "clay built nest" in the hot season, or the beginning of the monsoon, not so often about the dwellings of man as about his other works, bridges, for example, and wells, and especially road culverts. It likes to be near water. It usually lays three prettily speckled eggs.

But by far the commonest of the whole family in this Presidency is the Red-backed Swallow (Hirundo erythropygia; Jerdon calls it daurica). It is especially abundant about hilly or rocky country. Just at the beginning of the cold season, in the morning, one comes upon them in some places in such numbers that the air feels overcrowded and they jostle each other on the telegraph wires. The upper parts of the Red-backed Swallow, including the wings and tail, are black, excepting only the sides of the head and the "small" of the back, which are light, rusty red. The under-parts are white. The whole bird, especially when young, looks dingy by comparison with the Wire-tail. The tail is deeply forked. This species also builds a mud nest in the hot season, under some bridge or overhanging rock, or a ledge in any building not regularly, inhabited; but its architecture is eccentric. The egg chamber is globular, and the entrance to it is by a neck as long as the bird has leisure to make it. Barnes says that the bird goes on lengthening the neck after the eggs are laid. There are usually three white eggs.

Our fourth swallow is the Dusky Crag Martin. Jerdon called it Cotyle concolor, but that has been improved upon, and it appears in Barnes as