494: OUR INDIAN PELICANS. 
lately sent to the Zoological Society by Capt. Beavan, from 
Burma, has a remarkably full pendent occipital crest, the long- 
est feathers of which measure 3°5 in. ; bill to forehead, 11 inches. 
This bird is very distinct from several examples of P. onoerotalus, 
apud Jerdon, which were forwarded together with it.” 
Now I may say at once that I have never yet seen or obtained 
one single specimen of either of Blyth’s two smaller races, 
in which, according to him, the adult male measures only 
56 inches in length and has a bill at forehead of only 11 
inches ; the bills in the males are always much larger than in 
the females, and 12°5 inches is the smallest bill of any 
female that I possess. Jerdon, however, it is to be noticed, 
gives the bill at 12 inches to 13 inches, which length, coupled 
with the size of the wing and the coloration of the bill, would 
make his javanicus answer very weil to the female of the 
common Indian species, at one stage of its plumage, while 
Horsfield’s original description, “ white with a short crest, the 
primaries black, the secondaries and feathers of the back 
margined with black, and the shafts white,” would again agree 
with our bird at an earlier period of the year. Horsfield, it is 
true, gives the length at only 4 feet; but this and Blyth’s 
measurements of 4 feet 8 inches were doubtless made from the 
dry skin. As for Mr. Blyth’s putting down his bird as a male, he 
did not dissect it himself, and I know from sad experience 
how little reliance can be placed on the sexes recorded upon 
tickets of most birds collected in India. 
Of P. minor, Riippell gives the length as 57 inches, the 
bill as 13°33 inches, the wing as 25°75 inches ; and this again 
would answer for our female. It is true that Riippell says that 
the full-plumaged male is throughout pure white, but the figure 
by Wolf shows it as tinted with rosy throughout, and in the 
diagnosis Riippell himself says that his new species is colore 
persimilis to onocrotalus, which is only pure white at one 
season of the year. 
My own present conviction is that we have probably only 
one, and certainly not more than two, species ef Pelicans 
belonging to this sub-group in India, and that all the three 
species described in Jerdon as onocrotalus, mitratus and javanicus, 
are nothing but different sexes, at different ages and in 
different stages of plumage, of one and the same species. 
This last year when in Sindh, where Pelecanus crispus is 
extraordinarily common, I on the 18th of January, in a huge 
broad at Madho near Mehur, caught sight in the far distance of 
a huge rosy white island dimly seen through and over many 
succeeding bands of rushes and reeds. I at first took them 
for Flamingoes, but on examination with a glass they proved 
to be Pelicans. In a small native boat we threaded our 
