Mr. W. C. Tait on the Birds of Portugal. 81 



No observations on the migration o£ birds on the coast of 

 Portugal seem to have been published hitherto. Palmen, in 

 his ' Zugstrassen der Vogel ' (the migration-roads followed 

 by birds), gives on his map the coast of Portugal as one of 

 them, and in this he is right ; yet he seems to have pos- 

 sessed very few data regarding this route, and these concern- 

 ing only two species on the north coast of Spain, and none 

 on the coast of Portugal. 



On the 18th April, 1884, when on a visit to the south of 

 Portugal with Dr. Hans Gadow and Mr. Scott B. Wilson, 

 I shot two specimens of a very dark-plumaged Sky Lark 

 on the summit of the Foja peak, Serra de Monchique, in 

 the extreme south-west of Portugal. Being surprised to 

 find Sky Larks in Portugal at this time of the year, as they 

 are all gone from the neighbourhood of Oporto by the end 

 of March, and remarking that my two Foja specimens were 

 of darker plumage than those seen near Oporto during the 

 winter, it struck me that the Foja Sky Larks might belong to 

 a southern form of this species, either resident or spending 

 only the summer there. My two specimens were unfortu- 

 nately lost through the carelessness of a porter ; but as this 

 Lark was afterwards found on the Serra do R,oxo, near 

 Coimbra, I obtained a specimen of a young bird and sent 

 it to England. Mr. Howard Saunders reports that a darker 

 specimen has been received from Riigen, Baltic, and there 

 is no ground for making it a new species. I draw attention 

 to this bird, as it appears to me quite possible that the 

 southern Sky Larks may vary considerably from the northern 

 form, and that those Sky Larks which are found in winter in 

 the fields near Oporto may not remain in Portugal during the 

 summer, but migrate north to France, England, Germany, 

 &c. They appear to me lighter in colour, but 1 have not 

 had the opportunity of examining more than two adult speci- 

 mens and one young one of the darker form. It is possible 

 that as winter comes on the northern dwellers may move a 

 few degrees south, taking the place of a more southern 

 group of the same species, which has also moved still further 

 south about the same time. We know that this obtains with 



8ER. V. VOL. V. G 



