NIGHT HAWKS AND WHIP-POOR-WILLS. 



313 



our peculiar little burrowing owls of tlie Western prairies (Speo- 

 tyto). Again, it is said that such owls as our screech owls (Mega- 

 scops) exhibit a dichromatism of plumage, being " rufous " in one 

 and, when adult, " gray " in the other, and that they have " ear 

 tufts " or plumicorns ornamenting their heads. Here it is inter- 

 esting to know that in the Malay Archipelago and in China we 

 meet with the goatsucker Lyncornis, which is also characterized 

 by the possession of " aural tufts " and a dichromatism of plumage 

 the same species having been taken in both a rufous and a gray 

 one. And so we might pass from one species to another, gathering 

 one habit here, and another point in anatomical structure there, 

 until the most skeptical person in the world would at last be con- 

 vinced that the two groups {Caprimulgi and Striges) were in some 

 strange way related. 



Plumicorns are also possessed by the remarkable Indian capri- 

 mulgine bird Bairachostomus, a species which also occurs in the 

 Malay Archipelago, and still other very curious genera of other 

 parts are the Nyctibius and ^gotheles and Podargus ; Podargus 

 cuvieri being fully three times as large as any known North 

 American species of goatsucker, being found in the island of Tas- 

 mania, where its peculiar cry has caused it to receive the name of 

 " morepork " by the colonists of that distant quarter of the globe. 

 But for the greatest oddities among these birds, especially in the 

 matter of plumage, we must turn to Africa, and that paradise for 

 the explorer, Madagascar. For instance, the Macrodipteryx of 

 Africa has the ninth primary feather of either wing developed to 

 a pennant-like length, and when the bird is seen during flight 

 these appendages float out in the most striking manner; being 

 still more peculiar in an allied species where the shaft of these 

 elongated feathers is naked, and it is only at their extremities that 

 a spatulate form of the web is retained. Madagascaran species 

 exist that even have still more remarkably developed wing feath- 

 ers, while in the South American Psalurus, again, it is the lateral 

 tail feathers that are greatly lengthened. 



In concluding this brief paper I would invite attention to the 

 fact that we find the family of goatsuckers immediately following 

 the family of owls in Audubon's Birds of America, and of the 

 former he observes that they are " very nearly allied in some re- 

 spects to the owls " ; and I am strongly inclined to the belief that 

 that " careful dissector of birds," the " Scotch anatomist " William 

 Macgillivray, had much to do with bringing the mind of our dis- 

 tinguished Franco-American ornithologist to that opinion. 



VOL. XLIV. 25 







