Mr. R. B. Sharpe’s Catalogue of Accipitres. 199 
to have been a young bird by the fact of its irides having been 
grey instead of yellow*. The British Museum possesses a 
similar specimen from Syria ; and another example, with an 
equal proportion of white in its plumage, and similarly dis- 
tributed, is represented on pl. 5 of Fritsch’s ‘Vogel Europas.’ 
Degland also mentions one in the Museum at Brussels as being 
“presque blanche” (vide ‘Ornithologie européenne,’ vol. 1. 
p. 60). 
Mr. W. R. Fisher, in an interesting paper on the variations 
of plumage in Pernis apivorus, published in the ‘ Zoologist ’ 
for 1843, p. 3757, figures and describes the partially white 
Horning specimen above referred to, and also a very similar 
specimen shot in Gawdy-Hall wood, Norfolk, as to which he 
remarks that it had “the space round the eye, and between 
it and the beak, dark ash-grey,” which would seem to indi- 
cate that it was an adult bird, and probably a female. This 
is the only instance that [remember to have met with, either 
in print or in collections, in which grey on the head was pre- 
sent in a specimen in which the sides and back of the neck 
and the greater part of the crown of the head were white— 
examples that are white on all those parts being usually im- 
mature, and the grey on the head being, in this species, an 
evidence of maturity. Mr. Fisher speaks of the Gawdy-Hall 
bird as being, at the time when he wrote, in the Norwich 
Museum; but either this is a mistake, or the specimen has 
long since ceased to exist in that collection, as it is not there 
now, and I can find no record of it except in Mr. Fisher’s 
article. . 
Phases of plumage sometimes occur intermediate between 
such specimens as the speckled-necked nestling from the New 
Forest, which I have mentioned, and the white-necked Hor- 
ning bird above referred to; the Norwich Museum possesses 
* In the young birds of this species the irides are grey in some speci- 
mens and brown in others; in the adults they are of a clear but rather 
pale yellow. 
+ It may be right to mention that the views held by Mr. Fisher in 
1843, as to the sequence of the changes of plumage, are not entirely in 
accordance with what is now known to be the fact in this respect. 
