BIRDS OF CUBA 125 



255. Agelaius assimilis assimilis Lembeye. 

 Cuban Swamp Redwing; Mayito de la Cienaga. 



Until Brooks and I re-discovered this species in the Cienaga de Zapata, 

 not far from the Laguna de Punta Gorda or where the Rio Hanabana 

 enters the Swamp, this Swamp Redwing was known only from the small 

 series which Gundlach collected. We observed one once in the swamp near 

 Cardenas in 1917, and a very few evidently remained there where Gundlach 

 found it abundant in 1842 and 1844. One great band, seen by us day after 

 day in the late afternoon, frequented a small group of trees near the open 

 Cienaga. Here they came from the far horizon to roost, perhaps the whole 

 species population together. Singing in chorus, they could be heard at a 

 great distance. I found the flock at the same spot three different years, 

 and the last time I watched it diminish day by day, in April, as the males, 

 assuming fresh breeding plumage, mated and moved off, to build in the 

 high rushes. Here the scattered pairs pass the summer. Brooks and I 

 have made a good series of skins of this hitherto excessively rare bird. 



This bird looks like our familiar Redwing, only it is smaller, and the 

 female is uniformly coal-black. 



The birds from the Cienaga of the Isle of Pines, which Bangs has 

 separated as a race, subniger, do not diifer from the Cuban birds in color 

 characters as we first supposed, but the race is nevertheless, and in spite 

 of Todd's statements, perfectly valid. The Isle of Pines birds all have a 

 rounded, and the Cuban birds a flattened, culmen. I disagree most 

 emphatically with the attitude which tends to consider only color characters 

 as the basis for taxonomic separation of races. 



256. Xanthocephalus xanthocephalus (Bonaparte). 

 Yellow-headed Blackbird. 



There are two instances of the occurrence of the Yellow-headed 

 Blackbird, Gundlach's specimen, now in his cabinet, which came from the 

 Havana market, and Ramsden's record for Guantanamo (Auk, vol. 29, 

 p. 103, 1912). 



