Birds of Southern Kamerun. 
47 
No. 2834. <$ imm. Bitye, Oct. 31, 1907. Stomach con¬ 
taining hard dry seeds and bits of some large insect. Iris 
whitish ; feet dark. Length of cnlmen 17 mm. This bird 
is greyish and moulting, the new feathers being black. 
The first three of these birds were put under Melanopteryx 
nigerrimus m a previous paper ( f The Ibis/ 1908, p. 350) ; the 
other three have been collected since the lot reported on in 
Dr. Sharpe's paper. 
These birds, of which the adults are perfectly black and 
the young dark grey, differ from the black adult males of 
Melanopteryx nigerrimus as follows :— [a) In the colour of 
the iris, which in that bird is conspicuously yellow, while 
in these it is conspicuously whitish. This is the point that 
I first noticed, and is what led me to note other points of 
difference. ( h ) The feet of all six birds are dark or black; 
those of M. nigerrimus flesh-coloured and also larger, (c) The 
culmen is ridged and narrow in these birds ; the pits for the 
nostrils are also very large. ( d ) Some of them are females, 
which in Melanopteryx would not be black, (e) These birds 
have non-muscular stomachs and seem to live largely on 
insects. 
These birds differ also from the perfectly black females 
of Malimbus that I have found :— (a) In the whitish iris— 
in Malimbus it is brown, so far as I have noted, and my 
attention was particularly drawn to that point; ( b ) in the 
longer bills—note measurements above; (c) in that some of 
them are males. 
I make this note of these six specimens to call attention 
to them. They do not seem to belong to any species that I 
know. I do not even know what genus to put them in, 
for they have no red in their plumage, not even the males, 
and so cannot go into Malimbus; and they are debarred 
from Melanopteryx by the fact that the males and females 
are alike. Perhaps they are Alexander's Melanopteryx max - 
welli from Fernando Po (‘ The Ibis/ 1903, p. 355). 
1354. Ploceus fusco-castaneus (Boc.). 
Cinnamopteryx fusco-castaneus Sharpe, Ibis, 1908, p. 350. 
This species seems to belong to the solitary and insect- 
