PT i: IK Hi LOSS IS FLAVIROSTRIS, Fra*. 
Yellow-billed Ara^ari. 
Specific Character. 
Pier, rostro stramineo-flavo ; tomice, mandibulce superioris emdrginotionibus nigris; mandibula 
inferiore aurantio tinctd. 
Male .—Crown of the head black; back of the neck between the shoulders dark chestnut-red; 
upper surface, wings and tail very dark green; primaries black, edged with very dark 
green; rump deep blood-red ; cheeks and throat blackish chestnut, bounded below by a 
narrow line of deep black; across the breast a broad crescentic mark of blood-red ; on the 
upper part of the abdomen a broad band of black, tinged with green; lower part of the 
abdomen and under tail-coverts yellow, stained with blood-reel next the black band, particu¬ 
larly on the sides ; thighs olive ; bill delicate straw-yellow, with a narrow streak of black 
along the serrations of the upper mandible, and a broad streak of orange-yellow along the 
cutting edge of the lower mandible; irides dark carmine-red; orbits immediately round 
the eye dark greenish grey, inclining to indigo-blue, and with a patch of red in the anterior 
angle above, and another in the posterior angle behind the eye ; legs green. 
Total length, 154 inches; bill , 3f; wing, 54; tail, 64-; tarsi, 11. 
Female. —Similar in colour, but with the chestnut hue of the throat paler, and the black mark 
bounding it below more conspicuous than in the male. 
Pteroglossus Azarce , Gould’s Mon. of Ramph., pi. 17. 
- flavirostris, Fras. in Proc. of Zool. Soc., Part VIII. p. 60.—Sturm’s Edit, of 
Gould’s Mon. of Ramph., p. .—Gray and Mitch. Gen. of Birds, vol. ii. p. 403, 
Pteroglossus, sp. 7-—Bonap. Consp. Gen. Av., p. 94, Pteroglossus, sp. 7- 
From the time I published my first drawing of this species, now nearly twenty years ago, until very lately, I 
have been greatly perplexed respecting the specimen in the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes at Paris from 
which it was taken, inasmuch as none of the numerous examples sent to this country agreed with it, and it 
was only upon a more careful examination of it on a late visit, that I discovered that the specimen had 
been partly manufactured, the second broad scarlet band across the abdomen having been substituted for 
the few stains of that colour which occur in the genuine specimensthis practice of malversating species 
cannot be too forcibly deprecated, tending as it does to produce inextricable confusion. 
We learn from Sturm’s Edition of this work, that the indefatigable Mr. John Natterer met with this 
species near Marabitana, on the 14th of May 1831, at which time it was moulting, and again on the 4th 
of June, in the woods on the banks of the River Xie, a tributary of the Upper Rio Negro; and that 
Professor Poeppig also met with it on the Amazonas, in the province of Maynas in Peru ; and I have very fine 
specimens from New Grenada. 
The Pteroglossus flavirostris may be at once distinguished from P. Azarce by the uniform straw-yellow 
colouring of its upper mandible, or in other words, by being without any trace of the red streak along that 
portion of the bill which is so conspicuous in P. Azarce ; and by its having a streak of orange along the 
lower mandible, which part of the bill in P. Azarce is entirely free from markings of any kind; in every 
other respect the two species are alike in colour. 
The figures represent the two sexes of the natural size. 
