410 THE BLACK-TAILED GODWIT. 
am not sure that he could distinguish between this and the 
representative eastern species, which would be the one most 
likely to occur at Dibrugarh, and neither Godwin-Austen, nor 
any of his or my collectors, have yet procured it anywhere 
in Assam, Sylhet, or Cachar, nor, though I found it not rare 
about Dacca, has it been sent or recorded from Tipperah or 
Chittagong. Blyth notes it from Arakan, but I have seen no 
specimen thence. In Lower Pegu it is found, Oates says, on all 
the tidal rivers, and is particularly common about the mouths 
of the Sitang. Ramsay, however, says that he only once saw 
the bird in Burma, and in all our collecting in Tenasserim we 
only once met with a single bird, and that near Moulmein. It 
has never been procured at the Andamans or Nicobars. 
Outside our limits, in the Malay Peninsula, China, Chinese 
Tibet, Mongolia, Southern and Eastern Siberia, it is replaced by 
the smaller eastern representative species (of which more anon) 
L. melanuroides, Gould. Neither species occurs, so far as we 
know, in Eastern Turkestan, but in Western Turkestan the pre- 
sent species has been observed on passage, and some may breed 
there. It has been procured at Cabul and Kandahar 
Beluchistan, in Persia, on the Caspian, near Shiraz, and at the 
mouths of the Euphrates. Again, it has been sent from Mesopo- 
tamia, and occurs in Asia Minor and on the coast of Palestine 
and throughout Northern Africa from Abyssinia to Morocco. 
Though extending rarely within the Arctic Circle, it occurs 
on passage or aS a summer or winter visitant, in most parts of 
Europe, including the Islands of the Mediterranean, the Canaries, 
the Feroes and Iceland, and has twice been recorded from 
Greenland. 
IN THE plains of Upper India, the earliest date on which I have 
ever shot the Black-tailed Godwit, is the 5th of October, and 
the latest the 9th April. But, as a rule, it is quite the end of 
October before they are well in, and almost all have left by the 
close of March. In Nepal Hodgson notes that they “ arrive 
in flocks of from ten to fifteen from the north in September, and 
then feed in the newly cut rice fields. They stay about a month. 
Ere they depart, they have separated into pairs, and then often 
stray into the later uncut rice. They return in Marchand April, 
mostly in pairs, but usually only remain for a few days then as 
the valley is too dry.” 
These birds must come from Northern and Western Siberia, 
where the species occurs, and it will doubtless hereafter prove 
to occur in Eastern Turkestan also, on passage. 
In Lower Bengal they arrive about the end of October and 
leave towards the close of March. Writing from Faridpur, 
Cripps says :— 
“To the south of my factory was a large expanse of paddy 
field, in the centre of which was a sheet of water of about 20 
