Letters, Extracts, Notices, ^c. 289 



of 'Stray Feathers/ and an extract from vol. vii., p. 150 

 (1878), will afford trustworthy information as to the distri- 

 bution of the species. 



Mr. Hume writes : — " Except at times of passage, they 

 [examples of P. hyperboreus'\ are never met with inland in 

 India. I have now received numerous specimens from 

 Karachi, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf, and they 

 occur also off the west coast of the Peninsula, though 

 spariogly, all the way to Ceylon, and up the east coast to 

 Madras, where my friend Dr. Ludovic Stewart obtained 

 the first specimen, and where I have since found that, at 

 times during the cold season, they are almost common in 

 the bazaar." 



To this I may add that off the Makran (or Baluchistan) 

 coast, and probably wherever they occur in the Indian 

 Ocean, these birds are usually found in the daytime in flocks, 

 resting on the sea, frequently several miles from land, and I 

 have seen what was probably the same species under similar 

 conditions near Aden. 



The other '' rare bird," the Oyster-catcher, though doubt- 

 less rare at Madras, where the sandy shore, without a rock 

 for hundreds of miles, is not suited to the bird's habits, is 

 by no means uncommon on parts of the Indian coast. 



W. T. Blanford. 



Feb. 25tL, 1896. 



Sirs, — In the January number of 'The Ibis' (p. 151), 

 you have remarked upon the late appearance of the ' Record 

 of Ornithological Literature ' for 1890. I beg leave to ob- 

 serve that the blame for this delay does not rest with me 

 but wholly and solely with the editor of the ' Archiv,' It 

 happens in this way: that it is the yearly volume for 1891 

 of the ' Archiv f iir Naturgeschichte,' in which the Ornitho- 

 logical Record for 1890, as well as that of the literature of 

 other classes of animals for the same year, is published. My 

 Records for the years 1891 and 1892 are complete, and have 

 been already a long time in MS., and those of the literature 

 of the years 1894 and 1895 have been actually published 



