THE EASTERN WHITE PELICAN. 
241 
gradually, feather by feather, and eventually becomes entirely white ; but 
birds with entirely white winglets are scarce. 
The rosy colour of the adult is peculiar to the breeding-season, which 
apparently lasts from September to about February. 
The deep chestnut lower plumage of the young bird is lost very gra- 
dually, and even old birds show a tendency to retain a tinge of it on the 
abdomen. It has been suggested to me that this chestnut colour may be 
caused by some colouring-matter in the water that the birds frequent ; but 
I have examined too many birds for this to be possible, and, moreover, the 
depth of the chestnut colour is always correlated with the brown colour of 
the upper plumage — the browner the upper plumage, the deeper chestnut 
the lower. • 
In the young the bill is blue, faintly margined with black ; the nail pale 
chestnut ; pouch ochre-yellow ; face violet ; iris orange ; legs yellowish 
white, the front of the tarsus and toes blackish; claws black. 
In the adult the rib of the upper mandible is blue, slightly mottled with 
white, the sides of the mandible red, with a central band of blue on the 
basal half ; nail coral-red ; basal half of lower mandible blue, terminal half 
yellow, the margins of the basal half red ; pouch gamboge-yellow ; face 
yellow ; iris lake-red ; webs orange-yellow ; tarsus and toes pink ; claws 
orange-yellow . 
Males measure : length 62 inches, tail 8, wing 28, tarsus 5* 5, bill at 
front 14 to 15 "75. The female : length 54 inches, tail 7, wing 25, tarsus 
4'5, bill at front 10*75 to 12, crest 4 to 5. Tail of 22 feathers in both sexes. 
The Eastern White Pelican is a seasonal visitor to the low parts of 
Burmah, arriving in August and probably leaving in January or February. 
It has an extensive range, and is found in India, but how far west it is 
impossible to say. In the Leyden Museum there is a specimen from 
Nipal with the lower plumage chestnut, and in the Paris Museum there 
is another specimen from Oudh killed by Major Sharpe. Mr. Hume met 
with a White Pelican in Scinde j but I am unable to say whether it was 
the present species or P. onocrotalus, and Mr. Hume himself throws no 
light on the question. It extends into China and Cochin China, the Malay 
peninsula, Java, Sumatra, Borneo and the Philippine Islands. 
This Pelican from February to August visits South Africa. I examined 
Lichtenstein^'s type of P. mitratus, a beautiful specimen, now preserved in 
the Berlin Museum, and found it to be a crested female identical with 
Burmese specimens ; it came from Kaffirland. There are other specimens 
in the Paris Museum from the Cape of Good Hope. 
P. onocrotalus, the European or western White Pelican, may possibly 
extend into India ; but I was not able to detect a single specimen of this 
species from India in any of the European museums I visited. I noted 
P. onocrotalus from the Danube, Greece, Syria, Egypt and Senegal; and in the 
VOL. II. R 
