406 ARMSTRONG’S YELLOW-SHANKS, 
of their coverts, pale ashy, in some feathers browner, and more 
drabby, in others greyer, each feather narrowly, more or less 
obsoletely, margined with white or albescent ; all the lesser 
coverts about the shoulder of the wing moderately dark hair 
brown; primaries and their greater coverts dark hair brown, 
almost black on the outermost feathers, paling as they 
recede towards the secondaries, and with a certain amount of 
white or greyish white on the inner webs; the later shorter 
primaries margined at the tips with white ; the shaft of the first 
primary very broad and pure white ; the shafts of the succeeding 
primaries narrower and brown, darkest towards their bases, 
palest, an inch or so, from their tips; upper tail-coverts white, 
showing traces of narrow, scratchy, imperfect, zig-zag or arrow- 
head bars ; tail feathers all margined with white ; the rest of the 
feather grey or ashy, slightly darkest just inside the white 
margin, and with more or less white freckling towards the shafts, 
especially on the outer feathers ; the feathers of the crown, 
occiput, back of the neck and interscapulary region, and some- 
times the scapulars, just perceptibly darker shafted ; a band 
from the gape under the eye and the sides of the neck and of 
the breast, white, with dark shafts to the feathers, and in the 
case of the sides of the neck and breast with here and there 
tiny, pale, ashy brown shaft patches also. 
I dare say specimens of this species have often been passed 
over as Common Green-Shanks, but it has a much broader 
culmen, and rather more massive bill ; the webs between the three 
anterior toes are very much more developed, and the tarsi are 
much shorter ; moreover, the winter plumage, though bearing a 
strong superficial resemblance to that of the Green-Shanks, ts yet 
altogether more uniformly coloured. There is none of the 
marked dark striation of the crown, and there are none of the 
dusky spots and markings just inside the edges of the feathers 
which characterise the entire mantle of the Green-Shanks, even 
in mid-winter. The whole mantle in our bird is a nearly 
uniform, mingled brownish and greyish ashy, the uniformity 
scarcely broken by the somewhat darker shafts of some of the 
feathers, and the very narrow, albescent edgings of some or most 
of these feathers. 
Although presenting this superficial resemblance to the Green- 
Shanks, our bird could scarcely stand asa Totanus ; indeed its 
short tarsi and much webbed feet rather recall Pseudoscolopax 
semipalmatus, but then the bill is much shorter and of a different 
character, wholly wanting the tumid multi-pitted ends of that 
species, and the membrane between the outer and middle toes 
is also proportionately larger. 
The bill is something like that of 7ringa crasstrostris, but 
stouter, broader, and longer, and with the lateral grooves 
extending only for 11-20ths of the length of the bill, and this 
peculiarity, of course, with the comparative shortness of the bill, 
