86 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. I46 



from Livingstone, Northern RJiodesia, collected on October 19. 

 These, and one other from Nyasaland, are the only black serratus out 

 of a series of 64 skins from the Rhodesias and Nyasaland in the 

 collections of the National Museum of Southern Rhodesia. In Nyasa- 

 land, Benson (1953, p. 35) noted two reliable sight records of the 

 black-phase serratus, one from Fort Johnston in March, the other at 

 Monkey Bay, in November. Benson assumed that these birds were 

 transients in Nyasaland, and called them migrants from the north. I 

 presume this means that they were looked upon as migrants coming 

 from (November) their more northern wintering grounds on their 

 return to their southern breeding area, or (March) returning to the 

 north for the off-season. 



To return, in our discussion, to southern Mozambique, Lamm {cit. 

 supra) mentioned that in early December he saw both color phases of 

 Clamator levaillantii ; however, without the specimens (which were 

 not collected), it is impossible to be certain that the black individual 

 was really levaillantii and not serratus, for the dark morph of the 

 former has not been found south of extreme northeastern Tanganyika. 

 In reply to my inquiry, Lamm has informed me that this sight record 

 was made at Vila Luisa on December 10, 1950. His notebooks record 

 an ". . . all black cuckoo with white wing patch; near it another, 

 black above, white below heavily streaked on the chest, probably a 

 pair . . ." 



It may also be mentioned that Pakenham (1948, p. 99) saw a black 

 crested cuckoo in Zanzibar, April 10, which he considered as probably 

 C. j. serratus. On the basis of the geographic proximity of Zanzibar 

 to the known range of the black phase of levaillantii, Pakenham's 

 bird may have been of this species. The mere sight record, un- 

 fortunately cannot be identified, and remains relatively useless. 



To summarize, the peripheral populations of the jacobin cuckoo, 

 serratus, in Africa south of the Zambezi River, and pica in northern 

 India, are highly migratory; typical jacobinus of southern India is 

 partly migratory, and serratus and pica in much of tropical Africa 

 are apparently fairly resident in some places and move about without 

 obvious correlation with season, climate, rainfall, or other noticeable 

 factors in other localities. In large areas of tropical Africa a breeding 

 form and two or more migrant, either transient or "wintering," 

 populations often occur together. The movements of southeastern 

 serratus, as evidenced by its melanistic morphs, are still unclear, but 

 there is no question as to their going north during the southern winter. 



