ASSAM, SYLHET AND CACHAR. 209 



troublesome to shoot, as it keeps much to the centre of 

 bamboo clumps and the heart of hedgerows. They show 

 themselves much often er than P. flaviventris, but they are very 

 restless little mites, never hardly keeping still for two seconds, 

 and rarely affording a fair shot. 



These birds looked very familiar to me, but I was here in the 

 home of the type of ru/ula, and I shot them steadily, and 

 measured several with the following results : — 



Legs and feet buffy fleshy, pale brownish ochre, pale brownish 

 fleshy yellow, and fleshy buff; claws a darker or lighter 

 brown ; bill black ; irides yellow, tinged with orange, to bright 

 orange yellow. 



Dimensions and colours of soft parts ( barring the mis- 

 print of corneous for carneous), agree perfectly with the descrip- 

 tion of the type, and so does the plumage, only G. A. omits 

 to notice that, in the fresh bird, there is an indistinct, or at any 

 rate inconspicuous, greyish white line from the nares over 

 the lores and eyes, and that the tibial plumes are brownish 

 rusty. 



In April I began to get birds very grey on the breast and 

 beginning to look hodgsoni-Mke, but in May and June there was 

 nothing but typical hodgsoni to be met with. 



Returning to our museum, I find that I have lots of rufula 

 and of hodgsoni both from the Dibrugarh district and from_ 

 Shillong, but all the rnfulas are cold season, all the hodgsoni 

 summer-killed specimens. 



But further when at Muddapur in Lower Bengal, Mr. Brooks 

 kindly shot and preserved for me about 100 specimens of 

 P. hodgsoni, shooting one, two or three every week right through 

 the year, and turning up now these specimens I find that all 

 his cold-weather hodgsoni are rufula, identical with Manipur 

 birds ; and going further I find cold- weather hodgsoni from 

 all over the country precisely identical with Manipur rufida. 

 But this is not all : this rufida is the bird identified for 

 me, and Brooks by Jerdon, as P. gracilis, and universally so 

 designated by all modern Indian ornithologists of whom 

 I know anything. Godwin-Austen, it is true, says that P. 

 gracilis, Franklin, has a marked pale rufous forehead, but 

 neither Franklin, Blyth nor Jerdon said anything of this, 

 and as a fact it is almost confined to Central Indian specimens, 



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