XII. MALLOPHAGA FROM B'IRDS (MOSTLY 



C O R \^ I D A E AND P H A S I A N I D A E ) OF 



INDIA AND NEIGHBOURING 



C O U N T R I E vS . 



By V. L. Kellogg and J. H. Paine, Stanford 

 University , California. 



(Plates xiv, xv.) 



At the suggestion of Mr. C. W. Beebe, Curator of Birds in the 

 New York Zoological Park, who visited the Indian Museum of 

 Calcutta in 1910, Superintendent N. Annandale of this Museum 

 sent to us a collection of Mallophaga taken from bird skins of the 

 Museum. These Mallophaga were taken from the skins of crows, 

 jays and pheasants, most of which had been collected in India. 

 Some, however, had come from China, Persia, Tibet, the Malay 

 Peninsula and elsewhere. The specific determinations of the birds 

 may of course be accepted without question, and the localities are 

 given for most of the specimens with admirable definiteness.' The 

 determinations of the Mallophagan parasites, together with des- 

 criptions of the new species found among them, are presented in 

 this paper. 



The collecting of dead parasites from dry bird skins in Mu- 

 seums would, at first sight, seem to be a proceeding attended 

 with a dangerous lack of certainty- concerning the relation of para- 

 site and host. A good deal of straggling might be expected. As 

 a matter of fact, this danger is not a serious one. The compa- 

 rison of host records based on collections made from dried skins 

 with records based on collections from f reshl}- obtained hosts in the 

 field, show that on the whole the records from the dried skins are 

 not misleading. Indeed a great majorit}' of the records in Piaget's 

 " Les Pediculines ", which is the monumental basis for all of our 

 knowledge of the Mallophaga and their host relations, were made 

 on a basis of the examination of skins in European museums. The 

 lack of danger from straggling comes about from the sedentary 

 habits of the parasites themselves and their early death after the 

 host's death. 



The collection of Mallophaga described in this paper is of 

 particular interest because it offers a rather intensive stud}^ of the 

 parasites of the Indian Corvidae and Phasianidae. The collection 

 of Indian birds in these two families is particularly large in the 

 Indian Museum, and parasites have therefore been taken from 

 many species in the two families and from many individual speci- 



i Specimens labelled "no history" are, with few exceptions, the skins of 

 birds that have died in captivity in India. — N. A. 



