i 
SHARP-TAILED GROUS. . 43 
' . ' .* . f . ' • f ■ * ; •; , 
an inch. The four middle are similar in shape, texture, and 
colour, being narrow, flaccid, equal in breadth throughout, though 
* 
somewhat dilated and cut square at the end. In colour they vary 
considerably in different specimens, the ground being generally 
black, and the tips white, but more or less varied, in some with 
white and in others with rusty, these colours being at one time 
pure, at another sprinkled with blackish, and assuming various 
tints; in one specimen they are disposed in spots, in another in 
bands, lines, chains, angles, &c., but generally in a long stripe on 
each side of the shaft at base, and in transverse spots at the 
point of the two longest, while they are in round spots all along 
each side of the two shortest: in one specimen the latter are even 
almost plain, being dingy white, sprinkled with blackish on the 
whole of their outer web: all the other lateral feathers, entirely 
concealed by the coverts, are pure white at the point, but with 
dusky shafts, and are more or less broadly dark cinereous at 
base: these feathers are very rigid, and of a curious form, tapering 
from the base to the point, where they suddenly dilate; they are 
deeply emarginate at tip, and their inner lobe projects consider¬ 
ably. The tarsus is two inches long; the slender hair-like feathers 
covering it are, as well as the femorals, of a dingy grayish white, 
obsoletely waved with dusky; the toes are strongly pectinated, 
and are, as well as the nails, of a blackish dusky, while the long 
processes are whitish. 
The foregoing minute description is chiefly taken from a hand¬ 
some male specimen from Arctic America. There is no difference 
between the sexes, at least we have not been able to detect any 
in all the specimens of both that we have examined: hence we 
conclude that the difference generally described by authors, and 
which we have ourselves copied in our Synopsis, that of the breast 
being chocolate brown in the male, and uniform with the rest of 
the plumage in the female, does not exist. The female is merely 
