From Edward Blyth   18 May 1868

My dear Sir,

I give what replies I can to your various queries.¹

1. I am unaware that any gibbon has the laryngeal Sac, with the exception of the siamang, H. syndactylus, peculiar to Sumatra. I think I can safely say that both sexes are equally noisy;² & the cry, hoc-co, hoc-co, (with modifications in the different species) although much louder, is essentially like that of the chimpanzee, & these animals bear a considerable resemblance to the chimpanzee in visage. I never heard an orang-utan emit a loud cry of any kind.

2. I do not believe that chameleons ever fight, & I do not remember the passage in L. and W. giving an account of a male Anolis fighting.³

3. The two lesser fire-back pheasants, Euplocamus erythropthalmus & its Bornean ally, are remarkable for having wholly black females with well-spurred tarsi, & the crimson on the cheeks is also well developed in the hen bird.⁴ The Burmese pea-hen (spiciferus) is always conspicuously spurred, & the common or Indian pea-hen is very commonly so—⁵ I once obtained the skin of a wild jungle-hen with well developed spurs. It is now in the Mus. As. Soc., Calcutta—⁶ Plumage that of an ordinary jungle-hen.

4. I am tolerably sure that both sexes of storks clatter their beaks, especially as I have seen several of the large Indian adjutants do so at the same time, & the great probability is that they were not all of one sex.⁷ But I will see further to this.

5. I never heard of male Turnices ⁸ fighting.

6. In the British larger pied woodpecker, both sexes of the young have a crimson patch (or rather tips to the feathers of) the vertex, whilst the adult male has a crimson occipital crescent, & the old female no red whatever.⁹

In Buceros nipalensis the old female is wholly black excepting on tail, while the male has the head, neck, and under-parts bright ferruginous.¹⁰ In the only nestling-bird I have seen (sex unknown) the colouring was that of the adult male. In our British blackbird & stone-chat the sexes are readily distinguishable in the nest.¹¹ In Palæornis javanicus the nestling male only has the upper mandible coral-red, it being black in the female until the second year or so, when it becomes red as in the male.¹² I know of no vividly coloured young birds which are duller when adult, beyond such cases as the barred juvenile plumage of Cuculus canorus, & the stripes of the young emu & analogous cases. There are species of egret-heron in which the young are white & the adults slate-coloured, as A. cærulea & A. asha; others in which there is both a white & a slate-coloured phase at all ages, as A. jugularis (the white phase of which is Herodias Greyi, Gray); and the African A. gularis would appear also to have the same two phases, for I have now by me a dark ash-coloured one in its first plumage, & a purely white adult with dorsal train, that has a portion only of two wing-feathers (a tertiary & one of its coverts) dark ashy.¹³

In this instance it would appear that the reverse change had taken place to what occurs regularly in A. cærulea & A. asha! But I suspect that both young & adults of A. gularis occur in the white as well as in the slate-coloured phase, and also more or less pied, which does not appear to be the case with jugularis, & Greyi is therefore recognised as distinct by Gould, following M^cGillivray, whom he quotes in his “Handbook of the Birds of Australia,” Vol 2, p. 309.¹⁴

—In the Z. G. there is now a recently captured Ibis rubra retaining some of its dark first feathers, while the rest of its plumage (save the neck) is deep scarlet; shewing that the latter here is not due to age.¹⁵ In captivity, at least in this country, the plumage of the Ibis rubra is never of more than a very dilute scarlet.—

By the way, I could never understand why the Plumbago rosea was so named, for in India its flowers are intense crimson, but at Kew I see that its flowers are only roseate.

This plant is a splendid ornament of the Burmese jungles, & its masses of crimson, and the masses of beautiful blue which I have there seen of Eranthemum erectum, do not bear out Wallace’s remark that there is no display in a tropical jungle to compare with an English display of Hyacinthus non scriptus. The fine crimson flowers of Euphorbia jacquiniflora ¹⁶ are much more brilliant under a tropical sun, & I could mention other instances,—Euph. Bogiri ¹⁷ for one. This however is a digression.

Yours Sincerely, | E. Blyth