100 University of California Publications in Zoology. \Vou.5 
edge of the Transition zone, and the lower border of the Boreal. 
Its distribution seemed to be co-extensive with that of the chin- 
quapin (Castanopsis sempervirens), provided that there was water 
in the near vicinity. These birds are like song sparrows in so 
many ways that it seems strange that they should be allotted to 
a separate genus. 
Since only the worn breeding plumage has been described, 
as far as I am aware, I take this opportunity of offermg a de- 
tailed description of the fresh fall plumage and also the juvenal. 
It will be remembered that there is in this.genus but one moult 
per year, after the post-juvenal, and that, as shown from my 
series of forty-two skins of Passerella stephensi, takes place dur- 
ing August. In naming the color shades I follow Ridgway’s 
‘*Nomenelature of Colors.’’ 
Male, adult (as determined by skull characters) ; No. 7311, 
Coll. J. G.; Bluff lake, August 29, 1905—This bird is in full 
newly-aequired annual plumage. The whole dorsum, top and 
sides of head and neck are uniform clear slate-gray with a faint 
hair-brown east. The upper tail-coverts and exposed surfaces 
of tail and wings are dusky walnut brown, brightest on the edge 
of the feathers. A spot on each side of forehead, shaft streaks 
in the auricular and loral regions, and whole lower surface white ; 
except that the feathers of the erissum are dark hair-brown, 
broadly margined with pale buffy white; and the whole breast 
and throat are flecked rather profusely with abrupt deltoid spots 
at the tips of the feathers, of the same color as the dorsum; these 
spots are smallest in the throat and even wanting altogether on 
many of the feathers of that tract; they are largest on the sides 
and more of a longitudinal cuneate form, while on the flanks 
the extreme is reached in that the feathers are broadly streaked 
with dark hair-brown and margined with a lighter shade of the 
same; in the maxillary region the many deltoid spottings are 
agelomerated into a mass; in the lower center of the jJugulum 
several feathers have their terminal spots extended over the whole 
ends of their inner webs, the combined result being a pectoral 
spot conspicuous at a distance, as with the song sparrows; the 
bill is dusky olive above and dusky straw-yellow beneath to- 
wards base. 
