146 Lt.-CoL Sir O. B. St. John on the Birds 



an Afghan servant to skin tolerably well. Most of my 

 specimens I transmitted to Mr. Hume from time to time, 

 and they are no doubt in his collection ; but several inter- 

 esting skins, all my mammals and reptiles, and all my notes 

 were lost with our baggage after the defeat at Maiwand in 

 July 1880. A few months later. Colonel Swinhoe arrived 

 in Kandahar and commenced collecting vigorously. I gave 

 him what assistance I could in the way of information, and 

 he later on obtained a list of Dr. Duke^s birds. The result 

 was a paper on the " Birds of Southern Afghanistan " pub- 

 lished in ' The Ibis ' for 1882, The title is somewhat mis- 

 leading, as his list of 199 species includes all the birds he shot 

 on the road from the plains of Sind to Quetta, of which the 

 following do not extend to anything that can be fairly called 

 Southern Afghanistan, viz. : Carine brama^ Coracias indi- 

 cus, Chatarrhoea caudata, Pterocles senegallus, and Ortygornis 

 pondicerianus . Of the remaining 194 species, twelve are 

 given on my authority, and twelve on that of Dr. Duke. 



Mr. Barnes, of the Bombay Army, was stationed at 

 Chaman, at the foot of the Khwaja Amran hills in 1880, and 

 published some interesting notes on the nesting of several 

 species in vol. ix. of ' Stray Feathers,' and later on a list of 

 birds observed and procured. Mr. Murray, of Kurrachee, 

 paid a visit to Chaman about the same time and sent several 

 specimens to Mr. Hume for identification. Till the army 

 evacuated Kandahar in April 1881, 1 had no time for collect- 

 ing ; but being detained at Quetta till November I picked up 

 a few specimens, and on leaving for England sent most of 

 them to Mr. Hume, who, however, did not find time to 

 identify them before his collection was sent to the British 

 Museum. Some specimens obtained by my collector after I 

 left were kindly identified for me by Mr. Blanford. 



As I have already mentioned, it was Mr. Hume's intention 

 to publish in 'Stray Feathers'' a list of the birds of the geo- 

 graphical province of Baluchistan, that is, from Quetta 

 southwards to the sea, and from Sind on the east to Persia 

 proper on the west. To this end he compiled a catalogue 

 from the material enumerated above (omitting of course 



