482 Mr. G. L. Bates on the 



Pteronetta hartlaubi. [Alot.] 



Bates, Ibis, 1909, p. 6. 



Male specimens (Nos. 3G61 & 4143) from Cameroon have 

 a small Avliite spot on the forehead at tlie base of tlie bill, 

 but have not nearly so much white as the birds which 

 Neumann lias called P. h. alb'ifrons (Bull. B. 0. C. xxi. p. 42). 

 All my female examples (Nos. 29, 33, 4142, and 4459) have 

 either no white or a very faint '^ticking" of white on the 

 forehead. This white spot is a sexual marking of the male, 

 "which is beginning to be acquired by fully adult or old 

 females ; it is more developed in birds from the Upper 

 Congo region than in those from the West Coast. 



The young, which are marked with four light spots on the 

 back, are caught on or near streams rather frequently. Last 

 November (vret season) a man found a female with nine 

 ducklings on land near his line of dead-fall traps, which w^ere 

 connected by a fence and placed near a stream for catching 

 small animals. He drove the birds along the fence till the 

 mother entered one of the traps and Avas caught; he also 

 cauglit five of the young ones and brought them to me. The 

 mother is the skin marked No. 4459. I kept the ducklings 

 alive for several weeks in a little pen of wire netting. They 

 ate cassava and maize meal put in water, and also greedily 

 picked up termites placed on the floor of their pen. The 

 most remarkable thing in their actions was the power of 

 climbing they shewed on the first day. "When put into an 

 old keg they soon climbed out, clinging by means of their 

 sharp claws to the rough wood. When I put them into a 

 wire pen they did the same, and it had to be covered over. 

 The first jump from the ground landed the duckling several 

 inches up the wire netting, where it clung with its claws ; 

 then another jumping effort, with one foot clinging fast, 

 brought its other foot far above the first station ; and so it 

 worked its Avay to the top. The disposition, and perhaps the 

 power, to climb ceased after a day or two; it seemed to be 

 a special endowment enabling these young ducklings, when 

 hatched in a hollow tree, to reach the opening and escape. 

 [See the account of the young of the Summer-Duck {^Ex 

 sponsa), J. f. O 1910, p. 101.] 



