﻿Aruba, Curacao, and Bonaire. 331 



15. CONURUS XANTHOGENIUS, Bp. 



Bonaparte (Consp. i. p. 1) described Conurus want ho genius 

 from a single specimen, without locality, in the Leyden 

 Museum. He gave Brazil as its habitat, but this, of course, 

 was wrong. The careful description of the type specimen 

 and notes on it in Finsch's work left me little doubt that 

 C. a: antho genius was the same as my Conurus from Bonaire. 

 To make sure I sent two of my specimens to my friend Biitti- 

 kofer, who kindly compared them, and found them identical 

 with the type of C. xanthogenius. 



C. xanthogenius is similar to C. pertinax, except that in 

 adult specimens the entire top of the head is of a beautiful 

 golden-yellow colour, somewhat more orange on the forehead, 

 while in C. pertinax the forehead only is orange-yellow. One 

 specimen only having been known until lately, it was, in my 

 opinion, quite reasonable to consider this form merely as an 

 individual variety, as has been done by Finsch, Schlegel, 

 Salvadori, and others. Since, however, all the adult speci- 

 mens from Bonaire have the entire top of the head golden 

 yellow, or at least strongly intermixed with golden yellow 

 (all the new-coming feathers being of this colour), there can 

 be no doubt that C. xanthogenius must stand as a distinct 

 insular form. There is among the series of C. pertinax in 

 the British and Leyden Museums, and among those collected 

 by Herr Peters and myself on Curacao, not one specimen 

 with the top of the head yellow, although occasionally, but 

 very rarely, a yellow feather appears there, chiefly in caged 

 birds, as is common in Parrots, which are so much inclined 

 to xanthochroism. 



The young of C. xanthogenius are similar to the young of 

 C. pertinax, but begin to show yellow feathers on the head 

 at an early age. While the young examples of C. pertinax 

 from Curacao have the upper mandible always whitish, this 

 part is brown (as in adult birds) in three immature speci- 

 mens from Bonaire, but in one from the same locality it is 

 more whitish. 



It seems that the culmen in the Bonaire species is some- 

 what longer, as a rule. The measurements of twelve speci- 



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