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Show 1876.] MESSRS. SCLATER AND SALVIN ON PERUVIAN BIRDS. 15 4. Note on the Spoonbill of the Argentine Republic. W. H. HUDSON, C.M.Z.S. [Eeceived November 17, 1875.] It has been said that Spoonbills " obtain their food by shovelling in the mud with their beaks." This is perhaps true of the European bird; the Spoonbills which I have observed feeding certainly obtained their food exclusively from the water, as Flamingoes do. In reference to the Rose-coloured Spoonbills of America, I believe ornithologists have been mistaken in referring them all to one species. Whether two or only one species existed was a moot question a century ago: it has been decided that there is but one, the Platalea ajaja, and that the paler-plumaged birds, with feathered heads and black eyes, and without the bright wing-spots, the tuft on the breast, horny excrescences on the beak, and other marks, are only immature birds. Now it is quite possible the young of P. ajaja resembles the common Rose-coloured Spoonbill of Buenos Ayres; but in that country, for one bird with all the characteristic marks of an adult P. ajaja, we meet with not less, I am sure, than two or three hundred examples of the paler bird without any trace of such marks. This fact of itself might incline one to believe that there two distinct species, and that the common Platalea of Buenos Ayres inhabits the temperate regions south of the range of the true P. ajaja. Other facts confirm m e in that opinion. A common Spoonbill was kept tame by a friend of mine seven years, at the end of which time it died without having acquired any of the distinguishing marks of P. ajaja. I have dissected three examples of the latter species, and observed in them the curiously formed trachea recently described by Mr. Garrod*. I have shot perhaps a hundred specimens of the common bird ; for they are extremely abundant with us. Of these I have opened about thirty, but in none of them did I find this form of trachea. I am therefore convinced that we have two distinct species of rose-coloured Spoonbill, inhabiting different portions of the continent. 5. O n Peruvian Birds collected by M r . Whitely. By P. L. S C L A T E R , M.A., Ph.D., F.R.S., and O S B E R T SALVIN, M.A., E.R.S.-Part IX.f [Eeceived December 8, 1875.] (Plate III.) The ninth collection of Mr. Whitely's Peruvian birds, now before us, has been formed in the same district of High Peru as the last was. It contains examples of sixty-five species. * P. Z. S. 1875, p. 297. t For Part VIII. see P. Z. S. 1874, p. 677. |