No. 1.— Notes on a collection of birds from the Sudan. 
By Joun C. PHILLIPS. 
Tue following collection was obtained by Dr. G. M. Allen and the 
writer on the Blue-Nile and Dinder Rivers, in Sennar, Sudan, from 
December 25, 1912 to February 25, 1913. A few birds were also 
collected at Luxor and Cairo on the way up and down the Nile. A 
visit was made to the mountain at Fazogli, a place which Mr. A. L. 
Butler tells me he found very rich in birds in May. Our visit in 
January yielded very little indeed, and this suggests considerable 
local seasonal movements of resident species, which is borne out by 
the various excellent papers of Butler on Sudan birds (Ibis, 1905, 
1908, and 1909). Since the Sudanese birds have been rather carefully 
studied in recent years, by Reichenow, Erlanger, Butler, Ogilvie- 
Grant, and others, it is not worth while to append many notes. 
I have therefore confined myself mostly to the status of some of the 
species as we found them in the winter months. 
Many of the winter birds of this region are European migrants, 
some are visitors from Egypt, while a large number are resident spe- 
cies and referable mostly to Abyssinian types. Thus the avifauna 
of the upper Blue-Nile is quite different from that of the White-Nile 
on account of this Abyssinian element. There is no true desert near 
the Blue-Nile and Dinder Rivers, the soil being a deep loess deposit, 
the so-called “cotton-soil,” which in the dry season becomes baked 
and cracked into great cakes. These contraction-cracks make travel 
very unconfortable. The entire region is wooded with a widely seat- 
tered thorn-forest, nearly leafless by mid-winter. The ground is 
covered by high grass which is largely burnt off in December and 
January. Along the banks of the river the scenery is a little more 
diversified. Palms, fig trees, Adansonias, and vines form thickets in 
which many species hide while going to water. A few isolated rocky 
hills or gebels protrude abruptly from the plain. From Gebel 
Fazogli eastward they begin to form the foothills of Abyssinia. 
The larger birds we did not have time to collect or preserve to any 
extent. Among the more striking may be mentioned the enormous 
numbers of European cranes present on the lower Blue-Nile, and also 
the Crowned cranes in much smaller numbers. Anatidae are scarce 
on the Blue-Nile, on account of its sandy character, the Egyptian 
