380 LANIUS CRISTA TUS. 



west coast, and is one of the best-known birds to ornithological observers in the cinnamon-gardens and similar 

 open bushy grounds in the vicinity of Colombo. Further south it is not so plentiful in the wooded semi- 

 cultivated country west of Tangalla as it is in the south-east of that place. In the low jungle-covered sea- 

 board around Hambautota, and thence north, it is very common, as it also is in districts of similar character 

 between Batticaloa and Trincomalie. Though not uncommon about Nuwara Elliva and Kandapolla, it does 

 not seem to pass over the Totapella range on to the Horton Plains. In the coffee-districts it prefers the 

 patnas to any other localities, and even frequents bushy situations at the top of such isolated peaks as 

 Allegalla, on the summit of which I have met with it. Its departure from the island takes place at the latter 

 end of April. I have seen it about Colombo until quite the end of that month. At Aripu Mr. Holdsworth 

 gives the duration of its visit from October till April. 



This species is spread throughout India during the cold season, leaving the country in the hot weather, 

 although some are said to remain and breed in the north. Blyth even says that a few are found about 

 Calcutta at all seasons. It is not recorded from the Travancore hills, nor from the Palanis, either by 

 Mr. Bourdillon or Mr. Fairbank, and the latter says it is rare at Ahmednagar. In Chota Nagpur it is, says 

 Mr. Ball, " common throughout." It extends to the eastward as far as Mount Aboo, where it arrives about 

 the 1st of September, according to Capt. Butler. Mr. Hume remarks that Mount Aboo is quite on the 

 confines of its distribution to the east; and, in fact, it is not recorded at all from Sindh nor the Sambhur-Lake 

 district. Whether, in its migration northwards, it passes round the western end of the Snowy range seems 

 to be not quite certain ; for though Mr. Hume at first identified Dr. Henderson's Yarkand birds as this 

 species, Dr. Scully, though he searched well for it, did not meet with it there, and .was, moreover, assured by 

 the Varkandis that only one species, L. arenarius, inhabited that region. To the east of the Peninsula it is 

 numerous. Mr. Hume writes that it is a cold-weather visitant to the Province of Tenasserim, and thence it 

 is a straggler to the Andamans as well, though not found in the Nicobars. In Pegu it is, says Mr. Oates, 

 " common during the greater portion of the year, coming in, however, in great numbers in September." The 

 influx here spoken of, which affects the whole of the peninsula of India, is caused, doubtless, by a migration 

 over the rauges to the eastward of the Himalayas, from Thibet, Mongolia, and perhaps Eastern Siberia. In 

 these distant regions it chiefly breeds, leaving them in vast flocks to travel many thousand miles southwards 



and aural stripe dark brown, paler and less of it on the lores in the female; all the under surface buff-white, 

 tinged with rich buff or rufous on the flanks ; vent and under tail-coverts, and the sides of the neck, chest, and 

 flanks crossed with crescentic markings of dark brown. 



In what is probably the plumage of the second year the upper surface is a ruddy brown with a tinge of grey in it, the 

 rump and upper tail-coverts rufous with blackish-brown bars, and the quills and wing-coverts less conspicuously 

 edged ; the forehead is still concolorous with the head, and the crescentic margins of the lower parts less pro- 

 nounced and faded from off the chest. Some examples (for instauce one shot in May) have the forehead pale, 

 the upper surface pervaded with greyish, and yet the under surface well marked with the brown bars, but the 

 sides of the chest and flanks have a rufous adult look about them. 



In some instances these under-surface markings do not vanish for several years : a specimen before me is fully adult 

 .>n the upper surface, but has most of the lower surface and even the sides of the neck crossed with brown 

 pencillings; and out of twenty-three, adult as regards the forehead and back, nearly half of them have some few 

 bars on the flanks. 



06*. I doubtfully include this species in our lists, not on the evidence of Blyth and Layard (for it appears to me that 

 they were speaking of the race of L. cristatus as a whole, as exemplified in the birds which migrate to Ceylon), but 

 on the testimony of Mr. Hume, who writes (' Stray Feathers,' 1873, p. 434) of an adult example received by him 

 from Ceylon, of which he speaks as follows : — " An adult bird, with the grey-brown head and back and pale fore- 

 head of lucionensis, either belongs to that species or to a very closely allied one not yet discriminated." 



I know of no other adult bird with the characters of L. lucionensis having been obtained in Ceylon. I cannot positively 

 assert whether one or two immature specimens in my collection may not belong to this species, for, as I have said 

 in my article on the last, the young of the two species are very similar ; and though, as a rule, the head in the 

 young L. cristatus, after getting beyond its nest-plumage, is more rufous than the back, this may not invariably 



