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AVIFAUNA OF LATSAN, ETC. 



Young birds have the iris dark brown ; upper mandible brown with the tip light, lower 

 mandible deep salmon-colour ; tarsi and feet grey ; soles flesh-colour. 



Adult female. Above dark olive-brown, washed with orange all over, somewhat redder on the 

 head and on the rump and upper tail-coverts. Below cadmium-orange or orpiment- 

 orange (llidgw. Nomencl. Col. pi. vi. figs. 1 & 2), deepest on the chin, throat, and breast, 

 lighter and paler on the abdomen, washed with olive on the flanks. 



Very few specimens show this final brilliant plumage ; in most examples, no doubt 

 younger individuals, the abdomen is strongly mixed with buffy white, the breast is 

 more of a yellow colour, and the upper parts are more olive, even with a greenish- 

 olive mixture. 



Quite young females are like the youngest males, but even more greenish above and more 

 tinged with yellowish on the abdomen, so that they are scarcely distinguishable from the 

 young of Oreomyza montana (Wils.) from Lanai. 



Every intermediate stage is also met with in the females, but they arc distinguishable 

 from immature males by having the gay mixture in the plumage of a yellowish or rather 

 orange colour instead of a more or less scarlet shade. 



Total length about 4| inches, and not above 5 inches, in skins ; but, as measured in the flesh, 

 Palmer gives it always above 5 inches. The wing varies in over twenty adult males 

 only from 2'5 to 2*63 inches, the tail from 2 to 22, tarsus 185 to 1*9, culmen 055 to 

 0*62. The few fully adult females which I have are a little smaller — wing 2*3 to 215 

 inches, culmen 0'5 to 0'55, tail and tarsus about the same as in male. 



Nothing but the red colour could have induced Mr. Scott Wilson to call this bird Loxops 

 flammea. The colour alone, however, cannot decide a bird's systematic position. In 

 the Sandwich Islands especially we have a number of bright red birds belonging 

 to different genera — the Himatione sanguined, the Vestiaria coccinea, the Loxops 

 coccinea, and the present species. Not only the unfeathercd operculum of the nostrils 

 and the straight elongated bill, but also the different wing-formula, the much stronger 

 feet and legs, and the habits altogether remove this bird from the genus Loxops. 

 Wilson, after uniting Oreomyza mana (which is most nearly allied to Oreomyza bairdi) 

 with Himatione, would have been more correct in classifying the bird under consideration 

 with Himatione than with Loxops. 



The colours of the soft parts given above are those of the first adult and the first young bird 

 shot by Palmer, but he subsequently gives the following note regarding these birds in 

 his diary: — "The colour of the bill and feet varies much (probably according to age), 

 from brown to grey on the upper mandible, from creamy yellow to deep rose-colour on 

 the lower mandible, and from brown to light grey Avith a pink tinge on the feet." 



Hah. Island of Molokai. 



