BIRDS OF ETHIOPIA AND KENYA COLONY 241 



ever, have a brown spot on the upper throat above the brown breast 

 band, while, to judge from Neumann's notes,''^ females of perkeo 

 have no spot above the pectoral band. I have seen no females of 

 perkeo, but Neumann,^^ in stating the characters of the species of 

 the genus Batis, writes that this brown throat spot is diagnostic of 

 B. molitor and its races, while perkeo is said to be very close (almost 

 conspecifically) to orientalis. In fact, if a specimen of B. orientali'S 

 somalieiisis had not been collected at the same time and place as 

 several of perkeo, Neumann writes that he would have called the 

 latter only a small subspecies of B. orientalis. If van Someren'd 

 series of perkeo have brown throat spots, they are wrongly identified. 

 The females have only a slight yellowish wash on the throat in 

 pe7'keo. 



This, by far the smallest species of the genus, ranges from southern 

 Shoa, southern Arussi-Gallaland, Gurraland, Garre-Lewin, and 

 Somaliland, south to north-central Kenya Colony, and possibly 

 along the subcoastal plain to the Taru Desert and the Serengetti 

 Plains near Kilimanjaro. Lonnberg *^° records birds from Njoro, on 

 the northern side of the Northern Guaso Nyiro River as Bath 

 oineiitalh somdliensis but writes that they are intermediate in size 

 between that form and perkeo, "and with regard to the rusty tint on 

 one of the females they may resemble '■perkeo^ perhaps even more than 

 ''somaliensis.'' The question is, however, if the difference is constant 

 for at the type locality for '■perkeo'' * * * ^somaliensis^ is said to 

 occur as well. The fact that of the two females in my collection from 

 the same locality one has that rusty tint * * * but the other not, 

 speaks against its value even as a subspecific characteristic." It is 

 obvious from the above quotation that Lonnberg was attempting to 

 make perkeo a race of orienialis and assumed that because he found 

 two types of birds together they were the same, rather than two 

 specific aggregates. In other words, his experience was just the 

 same as Neumann's, but the conclusions of the latter seem to be the 

 correct interpretation of the facts. Zedlitz ^^ correctly questioned 

 Lonnberg's notes and first connected the latter's Njoro records with 

 Neumann's Ethiopian ones by putting in print the capture of two 

 specimens at Marsabibi in the Rendile country east of Lake Rudolf. 



Both specimens collected are in molt (apparently the postjuvenal 

 molt, as the old remiges are dark brown, the new ones much blacker). 

 Their dimensions are as follows : Wing, 47.4-48 ; tail, 29-31 ; culmen, 

 11-12; tarsus, 16 mm. 



^Journ. fiir Orn., 1907, p. 352. 



"Ibid., p. 349. 



«>Kongl. Svenska Vet.-Akad. Handl., vol. 47, no. 5, pp. 83-84, 1911. 



«' Journ. fiir Orn., 1915, pp. 43-44. 



