BIRDS OF ETHIOPIA A17D KENYA COLONY 267 



these feathers wholly white, it may be a valid subspecies, but, at 

 any rate, its range is wholly restricted to the country west and south- 

 east of Lake Rudolf, as the Gorili bird appears to be typical 

 so')nalicus. 



Neumann gives the wing length of the type of mauritii as 105 

 mm. Size can hardly be used as a subspecific character because of 

 the great extent of individual variation. Thus, the two males have 

 the following dimensions : Wing, 99-108 ; tail, 94-106 ; culmen, 15-16 ; 

 tarsus, 26.5-27 mm. The three females: Wing, 95.5; 101, 103; tail, 

 93.5, 96, 99; culmen, 16; tarsus, 26-27 mm. 



Sclater ^* states that in the immature plumage the remiges, with 

 the exception of the innermost one, are blackish with the same dis- 

 tribution of white as in the adult. The females collected are all in 

 a late stage of the molt, and in two of them the old remiges are 

 fuscous-brown, not black. The inference is that the fuscous ones 

 are of the immature plumage. 



Sclater has shown, to my satisfaction at least, that Hartlaub's 

 name soTnalicus is identifiable, and therefore available for this shrike, 

 and as it antedates antinorii it must be used instead of the latter. I 

 notice that as late as 1920 Hart«rt continued to use antinoj'ii. 



Erlanger ^^ found this bird to be very numerous in northern 

 Somaliland, where it lives in the barren steppe country of the low- 

 lands. Sclater, paraphrasing Erlanger's notes, writes that the latter 

 "found it in great abundance in northern Somaliland, where it was 

 apparently arriving from the Abyssinian highlands in January and 

 February." What Erlanger wrote, however, was merely that "as 

 soon as we came to the outliers of the Abyssinian mountains, this 

 bird disappeared" (translation mine, the original being "Sobald wir 

 die Auslaufer der abessinischen Gebirge erreichten, horte sein 

 Vorkommen auf"). The fact of the matter is that this shrike does 

 not occur in the highlands at all, and its range occupies the low 

 country east and south of the Ethiopian inland plateau and moun- 

 tain ranges. Furthermore, inasmuch as Erlanger found nests with 

 eggs in northern Somaliland on January 24, the species could hardly 

 have been just "arriving from the Abyssinian highlands." As far as 

 known, the bird is nonmigratory. A number of writers, impressed 

 by the apparent close similarity between somalicus and dorsalis, and 

 therefore wishing to consider them conspecific, have relied on a hypo- 

 thetical migratory movement to account for the fact that specimens 

 of both have often been taken in the same or near-by places, but, as 

 Zedlitz has shown,^^ this would imply that dorsalis "winters" to the 



" In Shelley, The Birds of Africa, vol. 5, p. 259, 1912. 

 ^ Journ. fiir Orn., 1905, p. 701. 

 *> Journ. far Orn., 1915, p. 66. 



