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Show 360 MR. J. E. HARTING ON ANARHYNCHUS FRONTALIS. [May 27, markings as their parents, which fully proves that L. basalis cannot be the young of L. plagosus. A young bird of L. plagosus now before me, shot in September and supposed to have been hatched in June, distinctly shows the wavy bands on the chest, breast, and flanks, also the rufous blotches, to the same extent as the adult, on the second and third outer tail-feathers on either side. The accompanying coloured drawings represent the eggs of the various Cuckoos found in the neighbourhood of Sydney, and the eggs of their most usual foster-parents, as spoken of in my former paper. They are all taken from fresh specimens. EXPLANATION OF PLATE XXVII. I. Egg of Lamprococcyx plagosus. 2. „ basalis. 3. „ Cuculus inornatus. 4. ,, cineraceus. 5. ,, Acanthba lineata. G. „ pusilla. Fig. 7. Egg of Acanthiza nana 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. Geobasileus reguloides. Smicrornis brevirostris. Stipiturus malacurus. Chthonicola minima. Ptilotis auricomis. May 27, 1869. W. H. Flower, Esq., F.R.S., in the Chair. Mr. J. E. Harting, F.Z.S., exhibited a skin of a rare wading bird, Anarhynchus frontalis, from New Zealand, together with three bills of the same species which had been saved from birds eaten by the natives, and remitted through the kindness of M . Jules Verreaux. He remarked that the chief peculiarity in this bird lay in the form of the bill, which was curved, not downwards as in Numenius, nor upwards as in Recurvirostra, but to one side, and that he had good grounds for believing that this peculiarity was constant. He had seen six examples of the bird, and had heard of others, in all of which the bill was curved as described. He had no doubt, from its general appearance, that its habits resembled those of Strepsilas, although it differed in other respects from the only two species known of this genus. He believed that its nearest ally would be found in another New-Zealand bird, Thinornis novce zealandice, of which genus Thinornis another species, Thinornis rossii, had been found in the Auckland Islands. The bird now exhibited had been described so long ago as 1830 by M M . Quoy and Gaimard in their zoology of the 'Voyage de l'Astrolabe' (i. p. 252, pl. 31. fig. 2), and had since been noticed by Mr. G. R. Gray, in ' Dieffenbach's Travels in N e w Zealand' (ii. p. 196), in the 'Voyage of the Erebus and Terror' (Birds, p. 12), and in 'The Ibis' (1862, p. 234). Mr. Harting proposed at some future time to offer some further remarks on this curious bird. |
