EVOLUTIONARY TRENDS IN THE 

 AVIAN GENUS CLAMATOR 



By HERBERT FRIEDMANN 

 Director, Los Angeles County Museum 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



To APPRAISE as accurately as possible the involved situations that 

 exist in the species of Clamator, it was necessary to examine care- 

 fully large segments of the preserved material. Museum study skins 

 were inspected to evaluate the nature, frequency, and distribution 

 of the plumage phases, and the kinds and degrees of variation within 

 these phases for possible suggestive clues as to their nature. The 

 changes of plumages in all the included species were reviewed for 

 possible phylogenetic hints they might reveal. And the eggs of the 

 cuckoos and of their hosts were examined to determine the extent of 

 adaptive similarity, or the lack of it, thus avoiding undue influence by 

 earlier published opinions, some of which, as suspected, turned out 

 to be casual and rather uncritical estimates, or were based on geo- 

 graphic segments of the total picture. 



A research grant from the Frank M. Chapman Memorial Fund 

 of the American Museum of Natural History enabled me to spend 

 3 productive weeks at the British Museum (Natural History) in Lon- 

 don, where by far the largest assemblage of the pertinent material 

 is stored, and also to spend a few days at the United States National 

 Museiun in Washington. To the custodians of these bird collections 

 I express my thanks for their help. 



By loan of actual specimens and by correspondence from coopera- 

 tive curators of their respective collections, I have been able to 

 tabulate the data on material of special interest in the museums 

 of Bloemfontein, Bulawayo, Cape Town, Dundo, Durban, East 

 London, Khartoum, King William's Town, Lourenco Marques, 

 Nairobi, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, and Salisbury, 

 in Africa; of Bombay in Asia; of Basle, Berlin, Copenhagen, Genoa, 

 Madrid, Milan, Paris, Stockholm, Turin, and Vienna, in Europe ; and 



SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS, VOL. 146, NO. 4 



