348 ON TWO SPECIES OF BATEACHOSTOMUS. 



The second Owl I received on the 2nd April last year ; he 

 was much younger than the first bird at the time, and was 

 much whiter on the feathers of the head and under-surface. 

 At this early stage the whitish fluffy head, and particularly the 

 point of the forehead contrasts strongly with the ochreous disc 

 and black ruff, giving the bird a grotesque aspect. It did not 

 seem to acquire the revolving motion of the head until some- 

 what older ; but it used, when approached, to lift up its face and 

 execute a sort of balancing from side to side motion, which I 

 can only liken to that of the heads of those toys* which are 

 moved by a weight suspended in the body. I omitted to 

 notice above the capability wdrich this species has, when 

 alarmed or angered, or in any way excited by the appearance 

 of a strange animal, of erecting the dorsal and pectoral 

 feathers, projecting them out after the manner of Porcupine's 

 quills. The appearance presented under such circumstances 

 by my two birds, ruffled up into the form of a shapeless mass of 

 feathers, rotating their heads and snapping their bills was ludi- 

 crous in the extreme. 



#u tfao spaies ot gatrarjogtonma. 



I have two species of Batrachostomus which appear to me 

 to be as yet unnamed. 



The first is from the neighbourhood of Darjeeling (and is the 

 same, I think, as that of which Mr. Blyth obtained some frag- 

 ments, and which he identified with his affinis from Malacca, 

 but which it greatly exceeds in size), and the other from Ceylon. 



Now it may be as well to premise that neither of these are 

 apparently any stage of Ototlirix Hodgsoni. The adult of thi3 

 species is tolerably figured (the drawing is beautiful, but the 

 coloration is hardly truthful) P. Z. S., 1859, pi. 152, and both 

 adult and young (a nestling) are beautifully figured in one of 

 Mr. Hodgson's drawings now before me. Mr. Hodgson 

 obtained the adult female, young, and nest below Darjeeling, 

 towards the Great Runjeet at an elevation of between three and 

 four thousand feet, on the 20th May 1856, and besides the evi- 

 dence of his drawing, which shows that the young closely 

 resembles the female, he notes "young like adult but duller 

 hues." Otothrix is distinguished by its much smaller bill more- 

 over, so that I think we may perhaps dismiss the idea of even 

 our Darjeeling bird having any connection with Otothrix 



* Notably the little Chinese figures so common in the East. 



