748 . LETTER FROM MR. W. H. HUDSON. [Nov. 15, 
Manatee (Manatus americanus), as deduced from a fresh specimen 
of this animal forwarded to this Society in a living state by Mr. 
G. W. Latimer, of Porto Rico, C.M.Z.S., in April 1866, but which 
had unfortunately died just before reaching Southampton. 
This paper will be published in full in the Society’s ‘Transactions.’ 
The following (eighth) letter on the Ornithology of Buenos 
Ayres, addressed to the Secretary by Mr. W. H. Hudson, C.M.ZS., 
was read :-— Buenos Ayres, May 19, 1870. 
Dear Sir,—While you are just beginning to experience and ob- 
serve the reviving influences of spring, the bitter weather of the last 
few days ‘‘feelingly persuades” us that the cold season has come to 
Buenos Ayres. We have already had enough of rain, wind, frost, 
and cloudy days to make this May one of unusual gloom. The 
wild and melancholy notes of Winter Snipes and Plovers, that are 
always most numerous in severe seasons, are constantly heard, while 
of the summer visitors not a solitary straggler is to be seen, and 
the trees, that according to some theorists have no business to 
be growing on the Pampas, are fast losing their few remaining 
leaves. 
It is interesting to observe the effect of the cold weather on some 
of our resident birds—for example, the Urraca (Cyanoeoraz pileatus), 
to which probably the first Spanish settlers gave this name from a 
fancy that it resembles the Magpie of Europe. ‘The long tail of the 
Urraca, so awkward in windy weather, its slow laborious flight, 
scanty plumage, and climbing feet, in all things so different from 
the true Pampas birds, prove it to have been adapted to a hot celi- 
mate in a country abounding in forests. It is, [ believe, common in 
South Brazil, Paraguay, and the Chaco. The manner in which many 
species inhabiting these regions reach and become natives of this 
country I have tried to explain in former letters. The Urraca 
and birds like it with short wings, that obtain their food in woody 
districts, could only have extended so far into a country ill adapted 
to them by gradually advancing along the unbroken line of woods 
that border the Plata and its tributaries. In this littoral forest the 
wUrraca is most numerous, becoming rarer the further we advance 
west from it; but though it feeds much on the ground, it is never 
seen far from the vicinity of trees, except, as happens with the 
Pampas Woodpecker (Colaptes campestris), when passing from one 
isolated wood or plantation to another. 
The Urraca is in winter a miserable bird, and appears to suffer 
more than any other creature from cold. In the evening the flock, 
usually composed of from ten to twenty individuals, gathers on a 
thick branch of a tree sheltered from the wind, the birds crowding 
close together for warmth, and some of them roosting perched on 
the backs of their fellows. I once saw six birds roosting in this 
manner—two of them resting on the tree, perched on the branch, and 
one on their backs, so that they formed a perfect pyramid. But 
