BIRDS OF ETHIOPIA AND KENYA COLONY 75 



only remains to be stated that Mearns met with this bird rather 

 seldom in the districts he traversed. On the journey up by train from 

 Djibouti he saw none until he reached the high plateau above Gada 

 Bourca. "Here," he says, "they were fairly common, often soaring 

 high with the vultures, the white scapula glistening in the sun. They 

 are very tame. At one spot I shot three successively from a flock of 

 eleven and still they remained." In Shoa Mearns recorded only a few 

 at Aletta, March 7-13, other than the ones collected. He did not see 

 the species in northern Kenya Colony, and Lonnberg®^ found that it 

 "did not seem to occur on the steppe or in the thornbush-country north 

 of Guaso Nyiro." 



CORVUS CAPENSIS CAPENSIS Lichtenstein 



Corvus capensis Lichtenstein, Verzeichniss der Doubletten des zoologischen 

 Museums . . . zu Berlin, etc., p. 20, 1823 : Cape of Good Hope. 



Spexjimens collected : 



1 male, 1 female, Adis Abeba, Ethiopia, January 12, 1912. 

 1 male, 1 female, Alaltu, Ethiopia, January 15, 1912. 

 1 male, 1 female, camp west of Saleish, Ethiopia, January 18, 1912. 

 1 male, Arussi Plateau, 9,000 feet (2,700 meters), Ethiopia, February 20, 

 1912. 



This crow occurs from South Africa north to Angola and through 

 eastern Africa to the Nile Valley in the Sudan, to Ethiopia, British 

 Somaliland, Eritrea, and the Red Sea Province of the Sudan. It is 

 very scarce and local in Tanganyika Territory and is unknown in the 

 coastal belt of Kenya Colony and in Italian Somaliland. Two races 

 have been differentiated on the basis of size. The typical form is 

 the larger of the tAvo, having a wing length of from 320 to 390 mm, 

 the average being about 360 mm. It inhabits South Africa, the 

 highlands of Angola, and the highlands of northeastern Africa 

 (Ethiopia and adjacent parts of Bogosland). The smaller form, 

 hordofanensis Laubmann {C. capensis Tninor auct.), has a wing 

 length of from 300 to 340 mm, the average being about 315 mm. 

 This form occurs in the lowlands of Angola, in Rhodesia, Mozam- 

 bique, Tanganyika Territory, Kenya Colony, the Sudan, and British 

 Somaliland, but appears to be unrecorded from Uganda although ob- 

 tained near by in the Kavirondo country and on the east slopes of 

 Mount Elgon. 



The present series has the measurements given in table 10. 



Although large birds only are found in Ethiopia, the South 

 African birds are more variable and include not only the variational 

 range of the Ethiopian specimens, but also many smaller individuals. 

 The figures given by Meinertzhagen ^^ for birds from South Africa 



•sKongl. Svenska Vet.-Akad. Hand!., 1911, p. 93. 

 «" Nov. Zool., vol. 33, p. 91, 1926. 



