hollow, the shape of a finger bowl, lined with coir, or with horse-hair stolen from a mattress, or with whatever material can be had, not excepting brass wire from old sodawater bottles; for in Bombay the Crow population has multiplied to such an extent of late years that the competition for nesting materials has become terrible. In Marine Lines, as the season advances, the Crows patrol the road, or the gardenwalks, waiting for sticks to fall, or they get up into the trees and tug at twigs which are still green and will not come off. It is not many years since a pair living in the Fort discovered a real El Dorado in an Optician's shop. They worked that mine so stealthily and cleverly that before they were discovered they had succeeded in abstracting about Rs. 400 worth of spectacle frames, which they had worked up into a very superior nest, combining durability and lightness like a "helical tube." The museum of the Bombay Natural History Society contains a ponderous nest made entirely of iron wire, taken apparently from the ruins of railway fences. There are generally four eggs, of a dull bluish-green colour, blotched with brown. They are laid in May, so that, if all goes well, the youngsters will have arrived at the most expensive age just when the monsoon comes, bringing frogs and all manner of plunder. But if all does not go well the mother and her naked infants stand a chance of being washed out of bed together some stormy night. In Canara the Crows will not risk this, and have their nests at the end of the monsoon. The eggs of the Black Crow are somewhat larger than those of the common kind, and its nest is usually made earlier in the season.
