Mr. W. R. Ogilvie-Grant on the Genus Turnis. 465 



the true hottentotta and that, though he has omitted to men- 

 tion the black spots on the breast and belly in his description, 

 it ought not to be referred to the synonymy of T. nana. 



Group IV. — We now come to the group of Turnix in which 

 the sexes are different and the middle tail-feathers are not 

 elongated and pointed and edged with buff, and the feathers 

 of the upper surface do not present a scaly appearance. The 

 sides of the neck and breast in both sexes are ornamented with 

 round black spots, and the throat and middleof the breast and 

 abdomen are immaculate. The scapulars may or may not be 

 edged with golden buflF. The adult female has a wide rufous 

 nuchal collar (except in T. saturata) , which is entirely absent 

 in the fully mature male. The species here included are the 

 Asiatic Button Quails, T. tanki, T. blan/ordi {=T. maculosa 

 of Hume), and T. albiventris, together with T. saturata from 

 New Britain and T. maculosa from Australia, also the 

 somewhat doubtful species T. rufescens of Wallace, from the 

 island of Semao, which will probably prove to be identical 

 with Count Salvadori's T. beccarii from Celebes. Of these, 

 the first three are distinguished by Messrs. Hume and 

 Marshall (in the 'Game Birds of India, Burmah, and Ceylon'), 

 though, partly from want of specimens when they wrote this 

 excellent work, they had entirely failed to recognize the real 

 distinctions between them, nor have they made any mention 

 of the intricate changes of plumage between the young and 

 adult ^. 



The.fact is that the sexes, when fully adult, differ greatly 

 in plumage from one another ; but the difficulty experienced 

 in these species is that the younger birds of both sexes in all 

 three bear a very close resemblance to one another, and it is 

 only in the fully adult that the distinctive characters of the 

 species and sexes are clearly shown. All three species begin 



* Mr Hume had apparently no fuUy adult female specimens of either 

 T. tanki or blcmfordi {^= T . maculosa, Hume) till he bought Mandelli's 

 collection, with the exception of a fully adult female of the former species, 

 which was obtained in Hill Tipperah, where T. blanfordi also occurs. 

 This bird was not sexed by the collector, but was figured by Mr. Hume 

 in his ' Game Birds' as the fully adult male of his T, maculosa. 



