The genus Arachnechthra is characterised by a great difference in appearance between the sexes. The hens of all the species are very like one another; all are homely-looking birds, dull greenish brown above and pale yellow below. The cocks of the various species are arrayed in metallic colours as resplendent as those that decorate humming birds.

Seen from a little distance, the cock of the purple-rumped species is a bird with dark head, neck, wings, back, and tail, and bright yellow under parts, while the female is brown above and yellowish beneath. Thus at a distance the male does not look much more beautiful than the female, but if one is able to creep up sufficiently near him his plumage is seen to be unsurpassable; it glistens with a splendid metallic sheen, which is purple or green according to the direction from which the sun’s rays fall upon it. On the top of the head is a patch of brilliant shining metallic green, which exceeds in beauty any crown devised by man.

The cocks of the purple and Loten’s species are very much alike, but may be readily distinguished by the fact that the slender curved bill of Loten’s is considerably longer than that of its cousin. How shall I describe these beautiful birds? In my volume Indian Birds I classed them among black birds, because they look black when seen at a distance, but I stated that they are in reality dark purple, and have been taken to task for not classing them among the blue birds. The fact of the matter is that these birds cannot be said to be of any colour; like shot silk, their hue depends upon the angle at which the sun’s rays fall upon them. In the sunlight their plumage glistens like a new silk hat, and sometimes the sheen looks lilac and at others green.

The habits of all three species appear to be exactly alike.

The cocks of all have fine voices. At his best the purple sunbird sings as sweetly as a canary. Indeed, on one occasion when I was staying at Bangalore I heard a bird singing in the verandah which I thought was a caged canary; it was only when I went to look at the canary that I discovered it to be a wild sunbird pouring forth its music from some trellis-work!

Sunbirds are always literally bubbling over with energy. They are bundles of vivacity—ever on the move. Although they eat tiny insects, they subsist chiefly on the nectar of flowers, which appears to be a most stimulating diet.

Sunbirds have long, slender, curved bills and tubular tongues, hence they are admirably equipped to secure the honey hidden away in the calyces of flowers. As the little birds insert their heads into the blossoms they get well dusted with pollen, so that, like bees and some other insects, they probably play an important part in the cross-fertilisation of flowers; but they do not hesitate to probe the sides of large flowers with their sharp bills, and thus secure the honey without bearing pollen to the stigma. It is pretty to watch the sunbirds feeding. They are as acrobatic as titmice and strike the most extraordinary attitudes in their attempts to procure honey. When there is no convenient point d’appui they hover like humming birds, on rapidly vibrating wings, and while so doing explore with their long tongues the recesses of honeyed flowers. To quote Aitken, “between whiles they skip about, slapping their sides with their tiny wings, spreading their tails like fans, and ringing out their cheery refrain. As they pass from one tree to another they traverse the air in a succession of bounds and sportive spirals.” Verily the existence of a sunbird is a happy one!

The nest of the sunbird is one of the most wonderful pieces of architecture in the world, and it is the work of the hen alone. While she is working like a Trojan, her gay young spark of a husband is drinking riotously of nectar! The nest is a hanging one, and is usually suspended from a branch of a bush or a tree, and not infrequently from the rafter of the verandah of an inhabited bungalow; sunbirds show little fear of man.

The nest is commenced by cobwebs being wound round and round the branch from which the nest will hang. Cobweb is the cement most commonly employed by birds. To this pieces of dried grass, slender twigs, fibres, roots, or other material are added and made to adhere by the addition of more cobweb.

The completed nest, which usually hangs in a most conspicuous place, often passes for a small mass of rubbish that has been pitched into a bush, and, in view of the multifarious nature of the material used by the sunbird, there is every excuse for mistaking the nursery for a ball of rubbish. Grasses, fibres, fine roots, tendrils, fragments of bark, moss, lichen, petals or sepals of flowers, in short, anything that looks old and untidy is utilised as building material.

In Birds of the Plains I mentioned the sunbirds’ nest that was literally covered with the white paper shavings that are used to pack tight the biscuits in Huntley and Palmer’s tins.

“It is curious,” writes Mr. R. M. Adam, “how fond these birds are of tacking on pieces of paper and here and there a bright-coloured feather from a paroquet or a roller on the outside of their nests. When in Agra a bird of this species built a nest on a loose piece of thatch laid in my verandah, and on the side of the nest, stuck on like a signboard, was a piece of a torn-up letter with ‘My dear Adam’ on it.”

Mr. R. W. Morgan describes a yet more extraordinary nest that was built by sunbirds in an acacia tree in front of his office at Kurnool: “It was ornamented with bits of blotting-paper, twine, and old service stamps that had been left lying about. The whole structure was most compactly bound together with cobwebs, and had a long string of caterpillar excrement wound round it. This excrement had most probably fallen on to a cobweb and had stuck to it, and the cobweb had afterwards been transported in strips to the nest.”

The completed nest is a pear-shaped structure, with an opening at one side near the top. Over the entrance hole a little porch projects, which serves to keep out the sun and rain when the nest is exposed to them.

The nest is cosily lined with silk cotton. The aperture at the side acts as a window as well as a door; the hen, who alone incubates, sits on her eggs, looking out of the little window with her chin resting comfortably on the sill.

Two eggs only are laid. The smallness of the clutch indicates that there is not a great deal of loss of life in the nest. The immunity of the sunbird is due chiefly to the inaccessibility of the nest. The latter is usually at the extreme tip of a slender branch upon which no bird of any size can obtain a foothold. When a sunbird does make a mistake and place its nest in an unsuitable place, the predaceous crows devour the young ones, as they did recently in the case of a nest built in the middle of an ingadulsis hedge in my compound at Fyzabad.

In conclusion, I should like to settle one disputed point in the economy of the purple sunbird (A. asiatica). Jerdon stated that the cock doffs his gay plumage after the breeding season and assumes a dress like that of the hen except for a purple strip running longitudinally from the chin to the abdomen.

Blanford denied this. He appears to have based his denial on the fact that cocks in full plumage are to be seen at all seasons of the year. There is no month in the year in which I have not seen a cock purple sunbird in nuptial plumage. I used, therefore, to think that Blanford was right and Jerdon wrong.

Afterwards I came across the following passage by Finn in The Birds of Calcutta: “The purple cock apparently thinks his wedding garment too expensive to be worn the whole year round; for after nesting he doffs it, and assumes female plumage, retaining only a purple streak from chin to stomach as a mark of his sex. . . . I well remember one bird which came to the museum compound after breeding to change his plumage; he kept very much to two or three trees, singing, apparently, from one particular twig, and even when in undress he kept up his song.”

Since reading the above I have watched purple sunbirds carefully, and have observed that during the months of November and December cocks in full breeding plumage are very rarely seen, although there is no lack of cocks in the eclipse plumage described by Finn.

Moreover, a purple sunbird which is being kept in an aviary in England assumes eclipse plumage for a short period each year at the beginning of winter. Thus there can be no doubt that the cock of the purple species does doff his gay plumage after the nesting season, but only for a short period. In January the majority of cocks are in breeding plumage, and, indeed, in some parts of the country nest building begins as early as February.