BIRDS. 57 
phenomena is doubtless to be accounted for by the fact that his personal experience with 
these finches was apparently limited to their maintenance in an aviary, in company with 
a variety of other birds. In accordance with the writer’s experiences, these finches will 
only manifest their natural habits and propensities to their fullest bent when, under 
conditions of untrammelled liberty, and a temperature coincident with that of their 
native habitat, they are consorted exclusively with individuals of the same species. In 
addition to making the acquaintance of these Poephile in their native haunts, in both 
Queensland and Western Australia, the author is at the time of writing, and has for 
about a year past been, the happy possessor of half-a-dozen living specimens. One 
pair of these represents the scarlet, and the other two the black-headed, varieties. 
As attested to in a previous paragraph, considerable doubt still exists among 
ornithologists as to the possession by these red and black-headed finches of a sound claim 
for separate specific recognition. When first discovered, the scarlet-headed form was 
supposed to represent the male, and the black-headed one the female, of the same specific 
type, and there are those who still hold to the opinion, and who assert that any gradation 
between the two may be produced. One fact—that the two forms are, as has been 
personally observed, commonly, if not usually, found in the same flock—lends much 
strength to this hypothesis. On the other hand, while the immature individuals of 
both forms do present what appear to be intermediate links, the author, in common 
with other observers, has experienced no difficulty in relegating the adult birds to 
their respective category. This is more especially easy of accomplishment in the case 
of living examples, and where their respective vocal talents furnishes a ready clue 
' to their sexual identity. Whichever of the two interpretations, however, may be the 
correct one, these birds constitute a most puzzling evolutionary conundrum. For if 
they be two separate species or even merely sub-species, how is it that, consorting 
in the same flocks, and living under precisely parallel conditions and environments, 
they have come to acquire their very definite colour distinctions? If gradations 
between the two were of more or less common occurrence, the circumstance would 
not be so remarkable, there being other birds—notably the Ruff, Philomachus pugnax—of 
which it is asserted that two male birds are never precisely alike in colour, though, on the 
other hand, every phase of variation occurs between the most extreme types. 
The evidence concerning the specific distinctness of these Poephile adduced by 
the latest authorities, and recorded in Dr. Butler’s book, most strongly favours the 
interpretation that the scarlet and black-headed individuals are variations only of the 
same bird, for which the title of Poephila mirabilis, as first applied to the scarlet- 
H 
