Proceedings of 

 the United States 

 National Museum 



SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION • WASHINGTON, D.C. 



Volume 124 1968 Number 3648 



Additional Data on Brood Parasitism 

 in the Honey -guides 



By Herbert Friedmann ' 

 Ornithologist Emeritus, Division of Birds 



Additions to our knowledge of the reproductive parasitism of three 

 African species of honey-guides are presented herein and correlated 

 with earlier information. The birds are Indicator indicator, I. minor, 

 and Prodotiscus regulus. Information recorded in this paper for the 

 latter species, while meager in quantity, is relatively important be- 

 cause so very little was known at the time of my previous reports 

 in 1955 and 1958. The data on the two Indicator species, on the 

 other hand, are far more extensive but of a kind that lends itself 

 to brief and easy reporting. 



The new data for Indicator stem from a total of 73 additional 

 instances of parasitism, 49 for /. indicator and 24 for /. minor. The 

 majority of these cases occurred with previously known host species, 

 and they support very well the earlier estimates of the relative fre- 

 quency of choice of the common hosts. They also bear out the fact 

 that usually only a single egg is deposited by the parasite in any 

 one nest of a host. In the present paper, I discuss solely those hosts 



1 Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, 900 Exposition 

 Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90007. 



1 



