4 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 2 65 



The glossy cuckoos, with which one nonglossy species, oscvlans, is 

 here united, following Serventy and Whitell (1962, p. 268), form a 

 fairly homogeneous group of small, parasitic cuckoos inhabiting New 

 Zealand, Australia, the East Indies and the islands of the southwest 

 Pacific, southeastern Asia and India, north to the Himalayas, southern 

 Tibet, and Szechwan, and all of Africa south of the Sahara. Within 

 this enormous range the group is represented by 12 species, wdth a total 

 of some 32 currently recognized species and subspecies: Of these 12 

 species, 7 (basalis, caprius, jiavigularis, maculatus, meyerii, osculans, 

 and ruficollis) are monotypic while 5 have more than a single form 

 each. Of these 5, 2 (xanthorhynchus and Haas) have 3 races each, 

 2 (cupreus and lucidus) have 4 apiece, while 1 (malayanus) has 

 no fewer than 1 1 subspecies, due no doubt to its occupation of many 

 oceanic islands with correspondingly greater opportunities for the 

 formation of isolated gene pools. 



In much of the recent literature one of the Australian species, 

 osculans, has been placed in a monotypic genus Misocalius, chiefly 

 because it lacks the metallic gloss on the upperparts found in the rest 

 of the species; the four African species (flavigularis, Haas, cupreus, 

 and caprius) have been kept in CJirysococcyx, and the seven Indo- 

 Australian ones {basalis, lucidus, malayanus, maculatus, xanthorhyn- 

 chus, ruficollis, and meyerii), in Chalcites. These three genera are 

 actually one group, for which Chrysococcyx, as the oldest name avail- 

 able, must be used. That they were not merged long ago is probably 

 due to the fact that the included species were dealt with chiefly by 

 regional specialists who did not attempt to study them all together. 

 Many years ago Sharpe (1873, p. 579) admitted that, were it not 

 for their glossy plumage and small size, he could not separate generi- 

 caUy these species from the larger, plain-colored, long-tailed birds 

 of the genus Cuculus. Similarly, the genus Cacomantis is difficult to 

 separate from either by trenchant characters. Yet each of the three 

 is a "natural" assemblage, and as such each commends itself to 

 generic status in the opinion of all taxonomists with extensive knowl- 

 edge of, and experience with, these birds. Thus, the species osculans 

 which seems like a link between Cacomantis and the Indo-Australian 

 section of Chrysococcyx, possessing the relative ely long bill of the former 

 and the shorter, less graduated tail of the latter, agrees with the 

 latter in its unbarred and unstreaked juvenal-plumage pattern, and 

 therefore is better placed in Chrysococcyx. 



Even Mathews (1918, p. 337), who kept osculans in a separate 

 genus, wrote that its evolution from an ancestral "form of Lampro- 

 coccyx is presumed, and if it spreads to the wetter districts it is sure 

 to become darker, more glossy and more like a Glossy Cuckoo than 

 the desert bird is. The egg suggests that of the Bronze Cuckoos, 



