AJAJA ROSKA. 115 



their knees and sweeping their long flat beaks from side to si(L a< thry 

 advance. An English acquaintance of mine kept one of these birds as 

 a pet on his estancia for seven years. It was very docile, and would 

 spend the day roaming about the grounds, associating with the poultry, 

 but invariably presented itself in the dining-room at meal-time, where 

 it would take its station at one end of the table, and dexterously catch 

 in its beak any morsel thrown to it. 



I believe that more than one species of Spoonbill inhabits South 

 America, and that the common Spoonbill of the pampas is a distinct 

 species from the well-known Ajaja. Some remarks of mine on this 

 subject were printed in the ' Proceedings of the Zoological Society of 

 London ' about nine years ago; but I find that I am alone amongst 

 ornithologists in this belief ; I can, therefore, only repeat here what I 

 have said before, and leave the question for time to decide. 



The general belief is that the pale-plumaged birds, with feathered 

 heads and black eyes (the Roseate Spoonbill having crimson eyes), 

 and without the bright wing-spots, the tuft on the breast, horny excres- 

 cences on the beak, and other marks, are only immature birds. Now, 

 for one bird with all these characteristic marks of the true Platalea 

 ajaja, which has a yellow tail, we meet on the pampas with not less 

 than two to three hundred examples of the pale-plumaged bird without 

 any traces of such marks and with a rose-coloured tail ; and the disparity 

 in number between mature and immature birds of one species could not 

 well be so great as that. I have shot one immature specimen of the 

 true Ajaja so immature that it seemed not long out of the nest; but 

 the head was bare of feathers, and it had the knobs on the upper man- 

 dible, only they were so soft that they could be indented with the nail of 

 the finger. Azara also mentions an immature bird which he obtained, 

 but he does not say that the head was feathered ; and even this negative 

 evidence goes a great way, since it would have been very unlike him 

 to see a Spoonbill with a feathered head and otherwise unlike Ajaja 

 rosea, and not describe it as a distinct species. 



There are also anatomical differences between the two birds ; the pale- 

 plumaged species having an ordinary trachea, while A. rosea has a very 

 curiously -formed trachea, unlike that of any other bird, which has been 

 described by Garrod as follows : 



" The trachea is simple, straight, of uniform calibre, and peculiarly 

 short, extending only two thirds down the length of the neck, where the 

 uncomplicated syrinx is situated and the bifurcation of the bronchi 

 occurs. The usual pair of muscles, one on each side, runs to this syrinx 

 from above, and ceases there. The bronchi are fusiformly dilated at 

 their commencement, where the rings which encircle them are not com- 



