I ^6 Brewster and Chapman on Birds of the Suwaiicc River. f April 



occur in this form have been so fully described by Mr. Scott* that it 

 is unnecessary to particularize them here, but we must express our 

 dissent from Mr Sennett'sf opinion that scottiils specifically distinct from 

 both crepitans and saturatus and that the latter is most closely allied 

 to crepitans. It is true that our material is much less extensive than 

 was Mr. Sennett's but nevertheless it is sufficient to furnish good grounds 

 for believing that these thi-ee forms intergrade and that saturatus is 

 much nearer to scottii than it is to crepitans. The extreme dark phase of 

 scottii is certainly very unlike typical crepitans, but in a large series of 

 the latter from St. Mary's, Georgia, we find several birds taken late in 

 March (and hence not long before the beginning of the breeding sea- 

 son) which incline sufficiently towards the grayer examples of scottii 

 to suggest the probability of complete intergradation at points where the 

 two forms meet. 



Oi saturatus we have only a single i-epresentative but this, according to 

 Mr. Sennett (who has compared the three), is in every way similar to Mr. 

 llenshaw's types (which are now in the British Museum). It differs very 

 decidedly from the grayer specimens of scottii, less markedly but still 

 quite appreciably from the blacker ones, and only very slightly from the 

 brownest examples of that form. Indeed several of the latter resemble it 

 much more closely than they resemble the gray extremes of their own 

 subspecies. As the black, gray, and brown phases are all represented 

 among breeding birds taken by us in one day and in the same marshes it 

 follows that these phases cannot be regarded as seasonal or connected 

 respectively in any way with different conditions of environment, but 

 that they must express either age or individual variation. If, as seems 

 not improbable, saturatus proves to vary to a similar degree and along 

 corresponding lines, it will certainly be a matter of much difficulty to dis- 

 tinguish it from scottii. As the matter stands, however, we do not as yet 

 know much about saturatus. 



Meleagris gallopavo. Wild Turkey. — On the evening of March 15, a 

 flock of six Wild Turkeys flew across the river about one hundred yards 

 ahead of us. These were the only ones observed and not more than four 

 others were heard. It is probable they are more common further back 

 from the river. 



Campephilus principalis. Ivory-billed Woodpecker. — An adult 

 male was shot March 24, in a cypress swamp on the river's banks, 

 about twenty miles from the Gulf. This and an individual heard March 

 29, further down the river, were the only birds of this species encountered, 

 and information we received from a resident of the region, who was evi- 

 dently reliable, led us to believe that the bird is rare. 



Note on Conurus carolinensis. — Through lack of definite information 

 it has generally been supposed that Paroquets are still found in the 

 cvpress swamps of the lower Suwanee. The inhabitant above quoted, 



*Auk, VI, April, 1889, pp. 154-155. 

 flbid., pp. 161-166. 



