on the Sexes of Liothrix lutea.



133



yellow in front of the eye and ashy behind it ; it is likely enough

that these differences in individuals may he indicative of age, and that

the paler birds are the younger ones, since the only skin I have which

shows yellow in front of the eye was nine years in one of my aviaries,

dying in 1910 : on the other hand they may characterize Indian and

Chinese types.


If my present cock bird lives, it will be interesting to see

whether succeeding moults will produce a permanent change in the

coloration, more especially of the head. It is not rare for old birds

to develop white patches on various parts of the plumage, but if

such characters exist in young birds they tend to increase in extent

with advancing age, and certainly it would be very unusual for the

juvenile plumage of a species to be considerably brighter than that

of a mature adult.


Liothrix lutea has been pretty freely bred in Germany, and

the plumages from the nestling down to the fully adult feathering

have been carefully observed and noted. Russ says of the young

feathering :—“ Upper surface ash-grey, also the sides of head and

cheeks; wings blackish-grey; each primary with a narrow clear

yellow outer edging, through which the coming orange-yellow specu¬

lum, that is to say on the third to eighth primary, is already clearly

discernible ; moreover, the last mentioned primaries have a broad

whitish inner border,” &c., &c., but nothing is said about yellowish

or whitish patches on the crown.


Although at first sight very like the typical Indian form of

L. lutea, the inferior size of my bird and the various noticeable

differences in its colouring seemed at first to indicate something

more than what nowadays is distinguished under a trinomial desig¬

nation as a subspecies; but, after the complete growth of all the

rest of the plumage, the whitish streaks gradually disappeared from

the crown, which became uniformly golden olive. Whether the

growth of the feathers covers the previously revealed pale bases, or

whether the colour intensifies as the bird recovers vigour I cannot

say; but in our Goldfinch the front of the face after a moult is

sometimes silky golden at first, subsequently changing to scarlet.


My present male Liothrix differs from the slightly larger

Himalayan form in its more yellow-green crown, more slaty-tinted



