682 REPORT OF THE HARVARD AFRICAN EXPEDITION 
seeming to prefer the vicinity of settlements and the open places that they 
afford rather than the close proximity of streams. It was the first native land 
bird we saw on the West African coast, when on going ashore at Freetown, 
Sierra Leone, a pair was seen, one in hot pursuit of the other, giving loud rat- 
tling calls and finally alighting familiarly on the housetops. Thereafter we 
found them familiar village birds, frequenting the clearings, perching in dead 
trees about the villages, or boldly alighting on the peaks of houses or the pro- 
jecting poles of the native huts. They seem to be chiefly insectivorous and 
in the stomachs of the specimens taken were nothing but insect remains, includ- 
ing in one case some green locustids. Its confiding habits and characteristic 
manner of perching have won for it in Sierra Leone the appropriate names of 
Garden Kingfisher and Telegraph-bird. We usually saw them in pairs which 
may have been mated birds; or small family parties might be found, keeping 
more or less together on the outskirts of a village. They avoid the heavy forest. 
Halcyon malimbicus forbesi Sharpe. Nigerian Blue-breasted Kingfisher 
Halcyon forbesi Sharpe, Cat. Birds Brit. Mus., vol. 17, p. 247, pl. 6, fig. 2, 1892: Shonga on the 
Niger. 
About the size of a Belted Kingfisher; breast, sides of neck, shoulders, middle portion of wings 
and tail bright blue; remainder of wings and under side of tail black, throat and belly white; upper 
mandible chiefly red, lower black or with reddish edges; feet dull red. Gambia to Cameroon Mt., 
and inland to northern Nigeria. 
Superficially this at first might be mistaken for the preceding species but 
in addition to its larger size may be immediately recognized by the blue band 
across the breast and by the reddish instead of black feet. In habits it is more 
of a frequenter of the edges of streams and probably feeds to some extent on 
fish. Although Biittikofer regarded it as tolerably common along the Du and 
the Junk rivers, and secured a series from St. Paul’s River and Fisherman 
Lake, we saw relatively few, perhaps because we were unable to collect along 
streams to any extent on account of the high waters. The only adult we saw 
was one secured at Gbanga, but in mid-October, two nestlings were brought 
us at Paiata. Bittikofer notes that the stomach of a forest-killed bird con- 
tained grasshoppers and mantids, while those killed in the mangrove swamps 
contained small crabs. 
Halcyon leucocephala leucocephala (P. L. S. Miiller). Gray-headed Kingfisher 
Alcedo leucocephala P. L. 8. Miller, Syst. Nat., Suppl., p. 94, 1776: Senegal. 
Length about 8 inches; head andneck brownish gray to pale gray; a white eye-stripe and a small 
black mark before eye; back and shoulders black, rump and tail bright blue, latter with black inner 
edges; primaries black, secondaries blue edged with black; throat and breast white, belly and 
under tail-coverts chestnut red; bill coral red, feet dull red. Senegal to Cameroons and East 
Africa. 
This is apparently a rare or retiring species in Liberia, and a bird of dense 
thickets in the forest. Bittikofer in all his collecting secured but few specimens, 
these apparently in ‘“‘brushwood”’ along the Du and Junk rivers, or on the 
edges of clearings. We saw the bird but once, perched in a jungle of vines 
