February marks the beginning of the nesting season of the handsome pied kingfisher (Ceryle rudis).  This is the familiar, black-and-white bird that fishes by hovering kestrel-like on rapidly-vibrating wings and then dropping from a height of some twenty feet into the water below; it is a bird greatly addicted to goldfish and makes sad havoc of these where they are exposed in ornamental ponds.  The nest of the pied kingfisher is a circular tunnel or burrow, more than a yard in length, excavated in a river bank.  The burrow, which is dug out by the bird, is about three inches in diameter and terminates in a larger chamber in which the eggs are laid.

Another spotted black-and-white bird which now begins nesting operations is the yellow-fronted pied woodpecker (Liopicus mahrattensis)—­a species only a little less common than the beautiful golden-backed woodpecker.  Like all the Picidae this bird nests in the trunk or a branch of a tree.  Selecting a part of a tree which is decayed—­sometimes a portion of the bole quite close to the ground—­the woodpecker hews out with its chisel-like beak a neat circular tunnel leading to the cavity in the decayed wood in which the eggs will be deposited.  The tap, tap, tap of the bill as it cuts into the wood serves to guide the observer to the spot where the woodpecker, with legs apart and tail adpressed to the tree, is at work.  In the same way a barbet’s nest, while under construction, may be located with ease.  A woodpecker when excavating its nest will often allow a human being to approach sufficiently dose to witness it throw over its shoulder the chips of wood it has cut away with its bill.

In the United Provinces many of the ashy-crowned finch-larks (Pyrrhulauda grisea) build their nests during February.  In the Punjab they breed later; April and May being the months in which their eggs are most often found in that province.  These curious squat-figured little birds are rendered easy of recognition by the unusual scheme of colouring displayed by the cock—­his upper parts are earthy grey and his lower plumage is black.

The habit of the finch-lark is to soar to a little height and then drop to the ground, with wings closed, singing as it descends.  It invariably affects open plains.  There are very few tracts of treeless land in India which are not tenanted by finch-larks.  The nest is a mere pad of grass and feathers placed on the ground in a tussock of grass, beside a clod of earth, or in a depression, such as a hoof-print.  The most expeditious way of finding nests of these birds in places where they are abundant is to walk with a line of beaters over a tract of fallow land and mark carefully the spots from which the birds rise.

With February the nesting season of the barn-owls (Strix flammea) begins in the United Provinces, where their eggs have been taken as early as the 17th.