( Ixviii ) 



an hour before sunset armed with a net and stick, and got 

 most of my captures by beating the grass clumps and bushes 

 on which the butterflies had settled for the night. On the 

 first occasion when I saw S. eliminaia there, the sun had 

 just set, but had sunk behind a small jebel some few minutes 

 before, and it was just getting' dark. I caught sight of two 

 or three of the skippers flitting about at the entrance of an 

 old porcupine burrow (I had often seen butterflies in similar 

 situations before and recognised them as some sort of skipper). 

 I then rattled my stick round the sides of the hole, and they 

 came out in extraordinary numbers and I caught several. 

 I did this five or six times and some came out each time. 

 If left alone they flitted about for a short time at the entrance 

 and then went in again. They always settled with wings 

 fully extended and resting flat against the sides of the burrow. 

 I often passed this particular burrow afterwards and almost 

 invariably found some skippers present. The hole was partly 

 overhung by a bush which did not make it any easier to 

 capture the skippers. I found them afterwards at Billing in 

 more recently occupied porcupine burrows, and also under 

 the roots of large trees along the khor, which has high banks, 

 where the soil had been washed away and left dark hollows 

 amongst the roots, and also in cavities in the khor sides, but 

 always on the west side (the khor here runs N. and S.), I 

 presume so that the sun should not disturb them in the 

 afternoon by shining into the hollows, as it would have done 

 if they had been on the east bank. As regards S. plistonicns, 

 Plotz, if this is a black skipper with small whitish transparent 

 spots on the fore-wing as I think it is,* I found this first at 

 Dilling in November, 1904, and also at Tira Mandi in the 

 same month, and in each case recorded that they were always 

 taken in shade. Those at the latter place I generally took 



* The examples referred to by Captain Wilson are named S. plisto- 

 nicus in Trans. Ent. Soc., 1916, p. 284. There are 5 specimens at 

 Oxford in the collection made by him — 1 from Dilling, Nov. 15, 1904 

 (given as 1906 by a clerical error in the paper quoted above); 4 from 

 Tira Mandi, Nov. 23-26, 1904. In the collection of the British Museum 

 plistonicus stands under the genus Eretis, and Captain Wilson's speci- 

 mens are the same as a series (including an exam])le from the Atbara) 

 named Sarangesa laelius, Mab. I'he species of this genus will never 

 be satisfactorily determined until the types have been seen and the 

 structural characters worked out. 



