AVIAN GENUS CHRYSOCOCCYX 9 



not represented by breeding populations in the Bismark or the Solomon 

 Islands, where no glossy cuckoos are kno^vn to breed, and it is also 

 absent from Bali, Lombok, Simibawa, Flores, and Sumba, as well as 

 from Palawan and the northern Philippines. The race minutillus of 

 northern Australia has been treated as a separate species by some 

 recent authors. 



It requires no great imagination to see that lucidus and basalis are 

 closely related to the primordial "malayanus" stock. The three species, 

 although quite readUy distinguished, are sufficiently similar in appear- 

 ance to indicate that they are more nearly related to each other than 

 they are to any of the other species of the genus. As we have already 

 stated, malayanus has a very wide, discontinuous range involving 

 many islands. C. basalis breeds in southern Australia and Tasmania, 

 but -winters northward in the Sunda Islands, from Java to Sumbawa, 

 and has been recorded as ^eU from Borneo, Sumatra, the Malay 

 Peninsula, Celebes, the northern Natuna Islands, Kangean Island, 

 and Christmas Island (in the Indian Ocean). C. basalis is monotj^pic. 

 The third species, C. lucidus, has foiu" races, being next to malayanus 

 in the degree to which it has broken up into geographically differen- 

 tiated populations. Its breeding range includes the same portions of 

 southern Australia and Tasmania {C. I. plagosus) as does that of 

 C. basalis; plus New Zealand and the Chatham Islands, and possibly 

 also Norfolk and Lord Howe Islands (C. I. lucidus) ; New Caledonia 

 the Loyalty Islands, New Hebrides, Santa Cruz and Banks Islands 

 (C. I. layardi); and Rennell and Bellona Islands (C I. harterti). The 

 last two subspecies are resident; the first two migrate extensively, 

 plagosus wintering in the Lesser Sunda Islands, New Guinea, and the 

 Bismark Archipelago, and typical lucidus migrating through the 

 Louisiade Archipelago (Woodlark, Misima) to the Solomon Islands 

 and the Bismark Archipelago. 



On the whole, C. lucidus seems closer to C. malayanus than does 

 C. basalis, and it may be significant that the eggs of the first two 

 species are fairly similar, uniform olive-bronze to olive-green, oc- 

 casionally mth faint longitudinal streaks (as in C. m. poecilurus), 

 while those of C. basalis are very different, pinkish white, finel}' 

 speckled with pinkish red. C. basalis also has a bill relatively narrower 

 for its length than does either C. lucidus or C. malayanus, and it also 

 has more rufous in its rectrices than do the latter two species. 



C. malayanus is slightly smaller than either basalis or lucidus and 

 is usually thought to differ from both in the pattern and extent of the 

 rufous coloration in the tail — all the rectrices in malayanus having 

 some rufous, while in lucidus the tail has little or no rufous on the 

 next to the outermost pair of feathers and in basalis there is no rufous 

 on the outermost pair of rectrices but a considerable amount of this 



267-562 — 68 2 



