ASSAM, SYLHET AND CACHAR. 91 



all the rest rufous. Again, I have a bird with no signs of 

 immaturity, with only the forehead broadly black, the entire 

 crown, occiput, nape, and back pure grey, and only scapulars, 

 rump, and upper tail-covert rufous — a miniature Lanius schach 

 in fact, though with less rufous on the back. 



Commonly, I think, in the intermediate stages the whole 

 top and back of the head is grey, more or less patched with 

 black, while the entire interscapulary region is grey. 



In younger birds the exterior lateral tail-feathers are en- 

 tirely pale rufescent, greyish white on the lower surface, but 

 in old adults these feathers are entirely black, narrowly 

 margined with whitish. 



In birds of the year, the tail is brown, as in tephronotus, 

 but it gradually grows black ; but none of these changes are 

 synchronous. You will find birds with pure black tails, with 

 still a good deal of grey on the back, and others without a 

 trace of this grey, with the tails still only blackish brown on the 

 central feathers, and not even dark brown on the lateral 

 ones. Reviewing a large series from different localities of 

 birds of all ages, the variations in the plumage are very 

 striking, and the wonder is that in these present days, when 

 everybody seems bent upon making new species out of every 

 trifling variation, at any rate in the Grey Shrikes, these rufous 

 ones have thus far escaped. And I have gone rather in detail 

 into this question now in hopes of preventing the contagion 

 spreading to this sub-group also. All I can say is that, though 

 I could pick out of tephronotus two small series and out of 

 nigriceps four, perhaps even five small series, each of which, 

 if treated as the hapless Grey Shrikes have been treated, 

 would constitute a distinct species, yet, with a really large 

 series of over a hundred specimens of each, it is quite 

 clear that there are only two distinct species — tephronotus and 

 nigriceps, and that even these have some tendency to run into 

 each other. 



Lanius nigriceps is common in Central and Northern Sylhet 

 and Cachar. I have it from Shillong and various localities 

 in the Dibrugarh district, and Godwin- Austen notes it from 

 the Garos, but I have no further knowledge of its distribution 

 in these parts. 



[This species is very common, but affects grass lands (with 

 shrubs scattered about) more than the last species, They 

 begin to arrive in the Dibrugarh district in the last week in 

 July, and the majority leave by the beginning of April, evi- 

 dently for Bengal, where I found numbers breeding in the 

 Faridpur district.— -J, R. C] 



