NEW NORTH AMERICAN BIRD-FLEA SMIT 57 



also be found to cover a large area, and it is to be hoped that collectors 

 will turn their attention to the usually easily collected nests of barn 

 swallows. In Europe the nests of H. rustica, which are now usually 

 built inside barns and other outbuildings, are obviously too dry to 

 form a suitable environment for the development of flea larvae; the 

 same may apply to the nests of the North American subspecies. 

 Ceratophyllus affinis must have become associated with the barn 

 swallow long before this bird adopted man-erected shelters for nesting 

 sites, and it seems possible that it has not been able to adapt itself to 

 this relatively new macro-habitat, that it survives mainly in the rela- 

 tively few nests which are still built in natural sites (e. g., in roofs of 

 caves, in little rock-pockets in wild ravines, in sea-washed caverns) 

 and that from these natural sites occasional specimens are introduced 

 to nests in barns. This is a rather speculative suggestion and it is 

 only by collecting fleas from large numbers of barn swallow nests from 

 natural and man-made sites, both in the Nearctic and Palaearctic 

 regions, that we shall learn something about this intriguing question. 

 After the above was written I looked through those tubes in the 

 alcoholic portion of the Tring collection which were labeled as having 

 been collected from Hirundo rustica, and to my delight found in a 

 tube containing four males and ten females of Ceratophyllus gallinae 

 (Schrank) and one male of C. garei Rothschild (the occurrence of all 

 of which must be regarded as casual) a single female of C. a. affinis 

 Nordberg. The fleas in the tube in question were collected from 

 Hirundo rustica (presumably from a nest) at Wulfsdorf, 7 km. south 

 of Liibeck, Germany, in 1923 by W. Blohm, and the record gives some 

 support to my assumptions about the host and distribution of the 

 flea. Unfortunately the Wulfsdorf specimen is somewhat abnormal 

 (e. g., it has only two antesensilial setae each side instead of three, 

 several setae of one midtibia are malformed, and the anal tergum 

 seems to be shortened), so I do not feel justified in figuring any part 

 of it, but its sternum vii and spermatheca agree perfectly with those 

 of Finnish specimens and with the figure published by Darskaya. 



References 



Cross, E. A., and Knowlton, G. F. 



1953. Fleas on flyiug squirrel and barn swallow. Bull. Brooklyn Ent. Soc, 

 vol. 48, p. 73. 

 Darskaya, N. F. 



1950. Key to bird fleas of the genus Ceratophyllus. Materialy k Poznaniyu 

 Fauny i Flory SSSR, new ser., Otdlel Zoologicheskil, No. 15, 

 Ektoparazity, No. 2, pp. 85-105, figs. 1-19. 

 Smit, F. G. A. M. 



1956. Redescriptions of fleas described by Nordberg in 1935. Opusc. Ent., 

 vol. 21, pp. 132-146, figs. 1-17. 



U. S. GOVEnHHSHT PRitlTlNS OFFICE; 1958 



