482 
Mr. G. L. Bates on the 
Pteronetta hartlaubi. [Alot.] 
Bates, Ibis, 1909, p. 6. 
Male specimens (Nos. 3661 & 4143) from Cameroon have 
a small white spot on the forehead at the base of the bill, 
but have not nearly so much white as the birds which 
Neumann lias called P. h. albifrons (Bull. B. 0. C. xxi. p. 42). 
All my female examples (Nos. 29, 33, 4142, and 4459) have 
either no white or a very faint t{ ticking” of white on the 
forehead. This white spot is a sexual marking of the male, 
which is beginning to be acquired by fully adult or old 
females ; it is more developed in birds from the Upper 
Congo region than in those from the West Coast. 
The young, which are marked with four light spots on the 
back, are caught on or near streams rather frequently. Last 
November (wet season) a man found a female with nine 
ducklings on land near his line of dead-fall traps, w hich were 
connected by a fence and placed near a stream for catching 
small animals. He drove the birds along the fence till the 
mother entered one of the traps and Avas caught; he also 
caught five of the young ones and brought them to me. The 
mother is the skin marked No. 4459. I kept the ducklings 
alive for several weeks in a little pen of wire netting. They 
ate cassava and maize meal put in water, and also greedily 
picked up termites placed on the floor of their pen. The 
most remarkable thing in their actions was the power of 
climbing they shewed on the first day. When put into an 
old keg they soon climbed out, clinging by means of their 
sharp claAvs to the rough w r ood. When I put them into a 
Avire pen they did the same, and it had to be covered over. 
The first jump from the ground landed the duckling several 
inches up the wire netting, where it clung with its claws ; 
then another jumping effort, with one foot clinging fast, 
brought its other foot far above the first station; and so it 
worked its way to the top. The disposition, and perhaps the 
poAver, to climb ceased after a day or two; it seemed to be 
a special endowment enabling these young ducklings, when 
hatched in a hollow tree, to reach the opening and escape. 
[See the account of the young of the Summer-Duck [AZx 
sponsa ), J. f. O. 1910, p. 101.] 
