422 Mr. C. luorram on the 



XXII. — The Birds of Manchuria. 

 By CoLLiNGWooD Ingram, M.B.O.U. 



(Plate VIII.) 



I. Introduction. 



Two years ago I journeyed from Vladivostock to Berlin. 

 As the train travelled slowly through the wooded valleys of 

 the Khingan Mountains and across the park-like meadow- 

 lands of North Manchuria, I was much impressed by the 

 ornithological promise of that beautiful but comparatively 

 little known country. Upon my return home I immediately 

 searched the zoological libraries of London for information 

 on the subject — but could find none there. Of the Ornis 

 of Manchuria very little was known. In the " eighties," 

 Mr. (now Sir Evan) James brought back a small but 

 interesting collection from South Manchuria, while fifteen 

 years later a certain Capt. Karpow, then in the Russian Army 

 and quartered at Yingtzu, made another small collec- 

 tion, which I believe is now in the St. Petersburg Museum. 

 These two collections, both from the southern part of the 

 country, constitute all that is known to me of Manchurian 

 birds. Realising this and hoping that the country would prove 

 a fruitful field for ornithological research, I wrote to my friend 

 Mr. Alan Owston, of Yokohama, and with his assistance 

 arranged that a Japanese collector should visit Manchuria 

 during the summer of 1908. Although the results of this 

 expedition were disappointing in the sense that they yielded 

 no novelties, they were nevertheless extremely interesting 

 from another point of view — they served to fill in a considerable 

 gap in our knowledge of the geographical distribution of East- 

 Asian birds. After all, when the extreme severity of its 

 winter climate is taken into consideration, it is hardly sur- 

 prising to find that Manchuria can boast of no local races of 

 birds. According to Sir Evan James the temperature falls 

 to below —49° Fahr. in the north, while even on the coast it 

 reaches —10° Fahr. The summer, however, is temperate. 



