Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 3 (1899).djvu/271

Rh very probable. Salvadori, Giglioli, and Martorelli had specimens from these regions. The Marquis Lepri writes to me as follows:—"This Kite is with us a summer visitor, and fairly abundant without being positively common. It appears between the end of March and the beginning of April. It continues to pass until the latter end of May. It is then easily met with, being less shy than M. ictinus. I have this year seen more than one about the country-side. Several specimens are brought every year to the shop of the taxidermist De Dominicis, generally birds that have been caught in the Royal Domain of Castel Porziano, situated on the coast between Ostia and Anzio. So far as I have been able to observe, the Black Kite frequents running water, especially streams bordered by large trees. In the case of a specimen which I procured a few days ago, the stomach was full of fish. As for the breeding of the Black Kite, at least as far as concerns our province, I do not think that it occurs on the mountains, as Bonaparte states. I have never seen it on the mountain, neither is it known there. M. ictinus is also very rare on these heights; it does not breed here, though so abundant on the plain. M. ictinus breeds on large trees in woods on the plain, or beside running water; I have observed its nest several times. Referring to the extensive information which I have gathered on the subject, I think that the same holds good of M. migrans, and this is confirmed by the fact that at the beginning of July last year I saw in the shop of a bird-dealer a M. migrans scarcely covered with feathers that had been taken from its nest on one of those gigantic elm trees that border the Tiber near Castel Giubileo, a few chilometres from Rome."

—It is rare, according to the eminent De Romita, in the Puglie. De Fiore excludes it from Catanzaro, and Moschella mentions it doubtfully in his Catalogue of the Birds of Reggio, Calabria. He writes to me, however, in a letter of June 3rd, 1897:—"I have frequently observed the Black Kite this year; about twenty specimens have been caught. I have only been able to procure one specimen for myself—a male—and certainly not cheap." I also secured two specimens caught in that district on the 7th and 18th of May, kindly sent to me by Dr. Angelo Pertile. Our ornithological information from this vast region is, unluckily, very incomplete.