OX YNOTUS—OVSTER-CATCHER 681 
species, B. erythrorhyncha, with a wholly red instead of a yellow 
bill was afterwards found in Abyssinia, and thought for some time 
to be peculiar to the more northern part of Africa, but it is now 
known to occur so far south as Natal, while the first has been 
observed in Damaraland and the Transvaal. Very little more 
seems to be known of the habits of either, and the systematic 
position of the genus must be held uncertain. 
OXYNOTUS, the name of a genus of birds now ascertained 
to be peculiar to two of the Mascarene Islands— Mauritius and 
Réunion (Bourbon)—where the name of Cuisinier is applied to 
them, and remarkable for the fact, nearly if not quite unique in 
Ornithology, that, while the males of both species are almost 
identical in appearance, the females are wholly unlike each other. 
Though the habits of the Mauritian species, 0. rufiventer, have been 
very fairly observed, there seems to be nothing in them that might 
account for the peculiarity. The genus Oxynotus is generally placed 
in the group known as Campephagidx, most or all of which are 
distinguished from the Laniidx (to which they seem nearly 
allied) by the feathers on the lower part of the back and on the 
rump having the basal portion of the shaft very stiff and the distal - 
portion soft—a structure which makes that part of the body, on 
being touched by the finger, feel as though it were beset with blunt 
prickles. Hence the name of the genus conferred by Swainson, 
and intended to signify “prickly back.” The males, which look 
rather like miniature Grey Shrikes (Lanius excubitor and others), are 
—except on close examination, when some slight differences of 
build and shade become discernible—quite indistinguishable ; but 
the female of the one species has a reddish-brown back, and is 
bright ferruginous beneath, while the female of the other species is 
dull white beneath, transversely barred, as are the females of some 
Shrikes, with brown. Both sexes of each species, and the young of 
one of them, are described and figured in The [bis for 1866 (pp. 
275-280, pls. vii. and viii.) 
OYSTER-CATCHER, a bird’s name which does not seem to 
occur in books until 1731, when Catesby (Nat. Hist. Carolina, i. 
p. 85) used it for a species which he observed to be abundant on 
the oyster-banks left bare at low water in the rivers of Carolina, 
and believed to feed principally upon those mollusks. In 1773 
Pennant applied the name generically, though he and for nearly two 
hundred years other British writers had called the allied British 
species the “Sea-Pie.” The change, in spite of the misnomer—for, 
whatever may be the case elsewhere, in England the bird does not 
1 The only other instance cited by Darwin (Descent of Man, ii. pp. 192, 193) 
is that of two species of Paradisea ; but therein the males differ from one another 
to a far greater degree than do those of Oxynotus. 
