162 
CHISHOLM, Fairy Warbler 
r The Emu 
L Jan. 
little bird of the pleasing note. “Throat and the whole of the 
under-surface citron-yellow/' he wrote, in the course of that 
description. This was a trifle misleading, for the chin is white, 
with just a faint wash of yellow. Moreover, it is a little cuuous 
that the discoverer (a most able ornithologist) did not link his 
new bird with Gould’s Gerygone per sonata, the Black-throated 
Warbler. Perhaps it was the contrast in the throat colours that 
caused him to turn aside from the “masked” bird and record 
that the nearest ally of his discovery was G. albogulans, the 
familiar White-throated Warbler. That alliance, however, is 
merely in colour; in all other respects (including size) the new 
bird was much closer to the little jungle Warbler with the dark 
throat. 
This point became apparent later, of course, and by the time 
his Tabular List was published (1888) Ramsay ^himself ^had 
become doubtful as to the validity of flavida. I have, he 
wrote, “lately seen specimens of a Gerygone from the north-east 
coast, which seem to indicate that my Gerygone flavida is only 
the female of Mr. Gould’s Gerygone personata; but notwith¬ 
standing the great similarity in size and plumage, further proof 
will be necessary, as we have lately received the adults, male and 
female, of G. flavida , shot on taking their nest and eggs, and 
three males examined are exactly alike in plumage to the female; 
but it is not improbable that the young males of G. personata 
resemble the females in plumage, and breed before attaining the 
adult male livery. No specimens, however, in the plumage of the 
adult male of G. personata have yet been obtained from Rock¬ 
ingham Bay.” 
It was the doubt thus created that caused A. J. Campbell, in 
his Nests and Eggs of Australian Birds (1900) to turn aside 
from the Fairy Warbler. Most responsibility for the denial of 
the species, however, rested with the late A. J. North. Cer- 
tainly, Dr. R. B. Sharpe, in his Catalogue of Birds in the British 
Museum (1879) dropped G. flavida to synonymy as the female 
of G. personata, but he was acting on lack of evidence. North, 
on the other hand, admitted (in 1904) having before him six 
adult specimens labelled G. flavida, obtained by the late Kendal 
Broadbent from the jungles of Cardwell and the upper Herbert 
River, North Queensland, two of which the collector (a good 
field man) hadlabelled “scrub bird, new.” The fact that North 
could not find any difference between these birds and the females 
of G. personata was surely not sufficient basis for a denial of the 
species, particularly as he could not find in any collection typical 
examples of the fully adult male of the black-throated bird taken 
south of the Endeavour River. Nor was he on really safe 
ground in lumping the birds because from Cape York to Card- 
well the Yellow-breasted Gerygones nearly always were found to 
build their curious homes close to hornets’ nests. 
