I was delighted to find wild individuals of the handsome rubythroat (Calliope) which one so often sees in captivity.
One day a bird dashed past me on the hill, giving only" hurried impression of a large blue thrush with prominent white brow over the eye. As this is not a normal chat teristic of the blue rock-thrushes fam hazarding the guess that the bird was a Japanese or _blue-winged pitta, which has been known in this The Gray Minivet Another guess that I had to mako about a week ago was at what seems to have been a gray minivet. It was Perched on the upper branches of a tamarisk tree. It was evidently not shrike, for his head was not stout enough nor had he the right sort of beak. But he had the bold black me through the eye, like a shrike oF a streak-eyed wagiall. He could hardly be a wagtail T thought, for hho seemed to avoid the ground, he did very little with his long tail and he was very busily wriggling his head and neck and stropping his beak. The head markings too were rather different from those of the pied wagtails though he was quite ike them in build." Next day T'was looking through lists of birds observed in these parts and came across the name gray minivet; looked it up and found that it agreed remarkable closely with what I had seen the day before.
One more enigma met me to-day. Eagerly following up (but in vain) Feport that the Paradise flycatcher was to be seen close by, T came upon great concert of small tits competing In cheerful chorus. The note seemed to be that of the North China or tom tit, not the more mournful tone of the marsh tit (which is more common here in summer, it seems), but those of the birds that T could see were smaller than either of these, and the black of the head was too much for marsh tits and too little for the other. It seems doubtful whether the silver-throated tit comes this way and I should hesitate to say that their description agrees well with that one.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.