FAMILY CUCULIDAE 139 



a male from Quebrada Guisado, toward the Costa Rican boundary, 

 beyond Santa Clara, Chiriqui, taken January 26, 1958, at an elevation 

 of about 1,200 meters. I found the bird again on the Rio Guanico, 

 near Guanico Arriba, in southwestern Los Santos on January 24, 1962, 

 where a female was seen as it rested quietly low in undergrowth in 

 forest. In this same region Charles O. Handley, Jr., shot a pair in the 

 mountain forests near the summit of Cerro Hoya at 1,200 meters ele- 

 vation. 



The pheasant cuckoo has a strongly muscled body, including the 

 uropygial area, as would be expected from the large size of the rec- 

 trices, and the really extraordinary development of the elongated 

 upper tail coverts that appear almost as a second tail. The leg muscles 

 are weak. The nipple of the oil gland is bare. 



One of the birds collected had eaten a small lizard. Others had 

 taken large orthoptera. 



This species, like the striped cuckoo, is parasitic in its nesting, 

 though details as yet are little known. Friedmann (Centaurus, 1964, 

 p. 288) has summarized available information, which begins with an 

 account by M. A. Carriker, Jr., (Ann. Carnegie Mus., vol. 6, 1910, 

 p. 568) of a juvenile found at Pozo Azul de Pirris in the Pacific low- 

 lands of Costa Rica. This bird, fully fledged so that it was able to 

 fly, was flushed from a nest, suspended from a tree limb, built by the 

 broad-billed flycatcher (Rhynchocychts b. brevirostris) . Though Car- 

 riker could not find the parents, it did not occur to him that the young 

 bird was a parasite, for he assumed that the cuckoos had preempted the 

 nest. 



Von Ihering (Rev. Mus. Paulista, vol. 9, 1914, p. 399) described a 

 nest and eggs of the flycatcher Fluvicola pica albiventer collected by 

 Garbe at Cidade da Barra, Bahia, in November 1913, that in addition 

 to 4 normal whitish eggs of the parent held another, definitely larger, 

 that measured 23.3x16 mm, and was of a pale reddish color, with 

 many small reddish brown markings. It was suggested that possibly 

 this was the egg of Dromococcyx phasianellus. The egg of this 

 cuckoo finally became known when George K. Cherrie shot a female 

 with a fully formed egg in the oviduct at Descalvados, Mato Grosso, 

 December 4, 1916. This specimen, announced by Mrs. Elsie Naum- 

 burg (Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., vol. 60, 1930, p. 168), in the 

 American Museum of Natural History in form is long, very narrow 

 subelliptical ; in color it is faintly buff, without gloss, with scattered 

 irregular dots of rufous to dull grayish rufous, in part in an indistinct 

 wreath around the large end. It measures 25.2 X 14.3 mm. Recently 



