The Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) usually lay their large white eggs on the ground in long grass or thick undergrowth.  Sometimes they nestle on the grass-grown roofs of deserted buildings or in other elevated situations.  Egrets, night-herons, cormorants, darters, paddy-birds, openbills, and spoonbills build stick nests in trees.  These birds often breed in large colonies.  In most cases the site chosen is a clump of trees in a village which is situated on the border of a tank.  Sometimes all these species nest in company.  Hume described a village in Mainpuri where scores of the above-mentioned birds, together with some whistling teal and comb-ducks, nested simultaneously.  After a site has been selected by a colony the birds return year after year to the place for nesting purposes.  The majority of the eggs are laid in July, the young appearing towards the end of that month or early in the present one.

The nest of the sarus crane (Grus antigone) is nearly always an islet some four feet in diameter, which either floats in shallow water or rises from the ground and projects about a foot above the level of the water.  The nest is composed of dried rushes.  It may be placed in a jhil, a paddy field, or a borrow pit by the railway line.  A favourite place is the midst of paddy cultivation in some low-lying field where the water is too deep to admit of the growing of rice.  Two very large white eggs, rarely three, are laid.  This species makes no attempt to conceal its nest.  In the course of a railway journey in August numbers of incubating saruses may be seen by any person who takes the trouble to look for them.

“Raoul” makes the extraordinary statement that incubating sarus cranes do not sit when incubating, but hatch the eggs by standing over them, one leg on each side of the nest!  Needless to say there is no truth whatever in this statement.  The legs of the sitting sarus crane are folded under it, as are those of incubating flamingos and other long-legged birds.

Throughout the month of August two of the most interesting birds in India are busy with their nests.  They are the pheasant-tailed and the bronze-winged jacana.  These birds live, move and have their being on the surface of lotus-covered tanks.  Owing to the great length of their toes jacanas are able to run about with ease over the surface of the floating leaves of water-lilies and other aquatic plants, or over tangled masses of rushes and water-weeds.

In the monsoon many tanks are so completely covered with vegetation that almost the only water visible to a person standing on the bank consists of the numerous drops that have been thrown on to the flat surfaces of the leaves, where they glisten in the sun like pearls.