THE COMMON CRANE. 29 
THE PLATE is unsatisfactory. In the first place the artist 
having chosen to place the birds against a sun-set sky, has been 
compelled to show them as altogether browner and smokier, 
and less of a bluish grey than they commonly appear. No doubt 
against a sun-set sky they would look somewhat of the colour 
represented, but in ordinary daylight, with the sun falling on 
_ them, they look altogether greyer and bluer. I think most people 
would be dissatisfied with an artist who painted their portraits 
as they would look behind a green glass window, and our birds 
(and subscribers) have equal cause for dissatisfaction with 
Mr. Neale in the present case. 
Then the colours of the legs, bill, and irides are all alike wrong- 
ly given. The red patch on the head is far too bright, ad ought 
to commence where the artist has made it end ; it is occipital and 
not coronal. Lastly, the plate fails to distinguish between the 
bare and feathered portions of the head. 
A YOUNG bird, shot on the 25th December, had no portion of 
the face or head bare. The portions bare in adults were dense- 
ly clothed with small feathers, blackish on the lores, forehead, 
and over the eyes, and pale sandy on the middle of the crown and 
occiput. The feathers had very short more or less disintegrated 
webs ; the shafts of all black and bristle-like, projecting beyond 
the ends of the webs. The webs appeared a good deal abraded, 
and if entirely worn away, would leave their bristle-like shafts 
exactly asin the adult. The whole nape and upper part of 
the back of the neck were sandy brown, and there were traces 
of the same colour on the cheeks and ear-coverts. There was 
no white anywhere about the head and neck, and of the dark, 
in some almost blackish, slatey, so conspicuous in the adult, no 
trace was visible except on the foreneck. The tertiaries were 
scarcely elongated, and only reached in the closed wing to 
the ends of the primaries, whereas in adults, at the same season, 
they exceed these latter by from five to eight inches. 
Although even in the cold season the adults of this species 
exhibit trains, and although these become very fine by the end 
of March, I have never seen an Indian-killed specimen with so 
large and fine a train, or of so pure ablue grey, or with quite so 
much white on the neck, as is exhibited by a male killed in 
Finland in June. 
