1922.] On some Indian Wheatears. 151 



VII. Notes on some Indian Wheatears. 

 By Claud B.Ticehurst, M.A., B.C., M.R.C.S., M.B.O.U. 



(Text-figure 8.) 



It is always rather a source o£ satisfaction, I think, in these 

 days of changes to be able to show that what some of the 

 older authors wrote was perfectly correct, though somewhat 

 lightly cast aside by later writers. The birds — regular 

 "bones of contention" — which are dealt with in this short 

 paper arc instances in point. 



A. (Enanthe capistrata. 



This species was described by Gould in his ' Birds of Asia/ 

 and has been constantly muddled up by the older Indian 

 writers with the bird which is now often called jdeschanka, 

 with the consequence that old records of these two birds want 

 very carefully verifying. Thus Jerdon refers to capistrata 

 when he speaks of leuroniela ; Barnes used morio, and Hume 

 in his Catalogue also calls it morio ; later on he called it 

 ^^ica^a and also capistrata, and his final opinion seems to have 

 been that the latter was a stage of plumage of the former. 

 0|)inion since then has somewhat oscillated between this 

 idea and the acceptance of two distinct species. Thus Gates 

 in the ' Fauna of British India ' put them as distinct species 

 and described the salient distinctions quite correctly (as I hope 

 to show), though his statement that capistrata is a constant 

 resident in the plains of India is quite erroneous; Dr. Hartert, 

 on the other hand, in his Voo-. pal. Fauna retjards the latter 

 bird as a white-headed variety of a dimorphic species. 



I have examined a very large series (about 300) of these 

 Wheatears in the British and Tring Museums, and in 

 Mr. Whistler's and my own collections, and I have come 

 to the conclusion that tbey must stand as separate species 

 on the following grounds. 



I. Characters in the male. 



(a) In capistrata the crown is isabelline grey in winter 

 wearing to grey in summer or nearly white ; very often the 



