AUSTRALIAN GOSHAWK. 
A. approximans ; from the careful examination I made of these specimens, 
I was satisfied that they were all referable to the present bird — A. radiatus 
being the young male, A. fasciatus the adult, and A. approximans the young 
female. I have retained the term approximans in preference to either of 
the others, because radiatus actually belongs to another species, and the 
employment of fasciatus might hereafter lead to its being confounded with 
the ‘ Fasciated Falcon,’ an Indian species described under that name by 
Dr. Latham.” 
Gould’s rectification would seem to have made a clearance, but peculiarly 
enough he had described a new species, Astur cruentus, which induced more 
confusion than any previously formed. I am somewhat at a loss to account 
for the peculiar views held with regard to this “ form.” I don’t think I can 
do better than quote North’s account given in the Austr. Mus. Cat., no. 4, 
p. 16, 1898 : 
“ None of our Australian Accipitres have puzzled ornithologists as 
much as the present species. Gould, who described and figured it under the 
name of Astur cruentus, states in his ‘ Birds of Australia,’ that it is very 
common in Western Australia, particularly in the York District, and at the 
Murray. Whether he was quoting from Gilbert’s notes, or whether the 
statement was only a surmise on Gould’s part, it is impossible to say, but the 
fact remains that this species is undoubtedly the rarest of all our diurnal 
birds of prey. The late Mr. J. H. Gurney considered A. cruentus to be a 
synonym of A. approximans, a belief also for many years partly shared by 
Dr. Ramsay. Mr. George Masters did not meet with it on either of his 
collecting trips to Western Australia in 1863 and 1868. Mr. E. J. Cairn and 
the late Mr. T. H. Boyer-Bower spent over twelve months collecting at Derby, 
in the north-western part of that colony, and although both obtained several 
specimens of A. approximans, it was only a short time before the decease of 
the latter gentleman that he was enabled to send a box to Dr. Ramsay for 
examination which contained examples of the true A. cruentus of Gould. 
These were at that time the only known specimens obtained since Gould 
described the type nearly half a century before. Count Salvador!, who, 
however, has had the advantage of examining a typical specimen of Cuvier’s 
Falco torquatus in the Leyden Museum, and which Temminck, in his 
description of this species in his ‘ Planches Coloriees,’ in 1823, states is 
found in Northern Australia, Timor, and the Moluccas, pronounces Gould’s 
A. cruentus identical with this species, and also Nisus australis in the Paris 
Museum, described by Lesson in 1831 from a specimen brought by Peron from 
West Australia. Count Salvador! also ranks Astur sharpii, of Ramsay, from 
Port Moresby, New Guinea, as a synonym of A. torquatus. 
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