ON AN 



OVERLOOKED INDIAN SWIFT 



ERNST HARTERT 



In 186S BIyth described in the Ibis for the hrst time 

 a Swift, under the name of Cypselus acuiicaiida. The ori- 

 ginal description is not a very good one, but two of the 

 principal characters are mentioned, i. e. the deep black 

 colour of the plumage and the much pointed lateral rec- 

 trices. The majority of recent ornithologists have either 

 passed this species over with silence, or placed Blyth's 

 name as a synonym among the littérature on the Com- 

 mon Swift {Apus apiis) or its eastern representative form 

 [Apus apus peJiinensis). Hume in his once famous List of 

 Indian Birds placed Cypselus acuticauda as a separate 

 species, but the specimens in his collection labelled, and 

 mentioned in his writings as that species are merely birds 

 of the year of Apus apus pekinensis. Probably this latter 

 fact has been the principal reason which led me to place 

 Blyth's name as a synonym of Apus apus pekinensis on 

 p. 445 of vol. XVI of the Catalogue of Birds in the British 

 Museum, but more recently, in 1897, on p. So of no. 1 of 

 the Tierreich, I added a query. At about the same time 

 D"" Blanford in vol. Ill of his series on Birds in his Fauna 

 of British India quoted acuticauda without a query as 

 a synonym of Apus apus. Doubtless D'^ Blanford and I 

 overlooked the sentence of Blyth saying that his type 

 was in Liverpool, or either of us would most probably 

 have tried to see the type. 



