659(a). Muscicapula whitei whitei

(659 a) Muscicapula whitei whitei Harington.
THE BHAMO BLUE FLYCATCHER.
Cyornis whitei Harington, Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. ser. 8, vol. ii, p. 245, 1908 : Bhamo.
Muscicapula whitei whitei, Fauna B. I., Birds, 2nd ed. vol. vii, p. 135.
Robinson and Kloss define the range of the Bhamo Blue Flycatcher as follows :—
“Upper Assam, Upper Burma to French Laos, Yunnan and Tonkin, and through the Shan States South to Karen-nee and South Tenasserim.”
Under the name of Cyornis banyumas dialiloema Wickham thus describes the nesting of this species :—“I found this bird common in the latter [Shan Hills], and it breeds on the crags at Thoungyi. I shot the female off a nest, but this hardly helped me to identify the species, and I subsequently got a male. The nests are neat and well hidden against the moss-green trunk of a tree, sometimes quite low down. I found the nests in May and June, but I believe they also sometimes breed much earlier than this, as I shot a young fully-fledged male early in March. This young bird had a blue tail and a bluish tinge to all its feathers : it was with its parents.” This young male was undoubtedly a bird of the previous year.
Harington took several nests with either three or four eggs in April and May in the Bhamo Hills round Sinlum Kaba, at about 5,000 feet, while Cook took nests in the same place in 1913 and near Kalaw, in the Shan States, in 1912. These were all taken in April, but beyond this Cook has given no description of the nest, as he thought the birds were all the same as M. r. rubeculoides, and in a letter to me he merely says “the eggs and nests are exactly like those you found in North Cacher,” i. e., moss nests lined with roots and placed in holes in banks, dead trees, or rocks.
The few eggs in my collection are all like the dark unicoloured, or nearly unicoloured, eggs of M. r. rubeculoides.
Ten eggs average 20.5 x 14.5 mm. : maxima 20.5 x 14.5 and 18.5 x 15.2 mm. ; minima 17.9 x 14.0 mm.