94 BANGS — AMERICAN GALLINULE [ Vof.V^' 



straight, and in the Old World bird is rounding. The two should 

 surely be treated as only subspecies. I wholly agree with Hartert 

 that the Hawaian Gallinula sandvicensis Streets, differs more from 

 either of the two than they do from each other, and that it should 

 rank as an island species. Besides the characters usually given 

 to distinguish this bird, our series of fourteen specimens shows 

 other points of difference, — noticeably the great amount of red on 

 the front of the tarsus and the very short and delicate toes. 



The distribution of the American gallinule has been thoroughly 

 traced by Cooke, and is given in such detail, accompanied by a 

 map (Bulletin of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, no. 128, 

 1914) that little remains to be said here, except to emphasize one 

 or two points. These are the absence of the species in the enormous 

 area of eastern South America, from southern Brazil to extreme 

 northwestern Venezuela, and its absence again in northwestern 

 Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica. In the latter country it has 

 been taken but once or twice, — mere stragglers, — although so 

 much bird-collecting has been done there. 



The American gallinule occurs in the Galapagos. The one adult 

 in our collection, a male, from Albemarle Island, I cannot dis- 

 tinguish in color from certain North American skins; it is, however, 

 small. 



I have seen no fully adult specimens from California. These 

 should be carefully compared with Eastern skins, as the Cali- 

 fornian colony, as pointed out by Cooke, is wholly isolated. We 

 have one adult male from La Paz, Lower California, taken in the 

 breeding season — May 31, 1910— by W. W. Brown, Jr., that is in 

 every way, so far as I can detect, similar to eastern North American 

 specimens. 



In the American gallinule seasonal and individual variations are 

 slight. There is a gradual change from the young plumage to that 

 of the fully adult, a process which, I think, takes more than one 

 season, and the frontal shield becomes large and much swollen in 

 the breeding season. I fancy the frontal shield becomes larger, 

 year by year, for a considerable period, as some breeding birds have 

 enormous shields, while others in the same region possess only 

 moderately developed ones. 



