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Records of Two North American Corvids in Mexico

Robert T. Moore

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Records of Two North American Corvids in Mexico.--On March 10, 1944, Chester C. Lamb obtained a Raven (Moore Coll. no. 39398) at Charco Redondo, 20 miles west of Ojuelos, Jalisco, Mexico. It was obviously very large. Measurements disclose that the right wing is 465 mm., the tail 261 mm. and the tarsus 69 mm. Mr. Lamb recorded it as a female. If it is a female, the wing is about 33 mm. longer than the longest measurement given for a female of Corvus corax sinptatus, and, if there is some error involved in sexing and it is a male, it is 5.3 mm. longer than the wing of the longest male recorded by Ridgway (Bull. U. S. Nat. Mus., 50, pt. 3:262). In fact both wing and tail measurements are larger than the largest measurements of Corvzrs coraz principalis. The tarsal length (69 mm.) lies between the maximum and the minimum lengths of both races. Only for the exposed culmen do we have a measurement closer to sin/&us. The unusually large size of both wing and tail and the normal tarsal length indicates that this bird is a representative of C. c. principalis, possessing a somewhat smaller bill than usual. Apparently this is the first record of this northern i+ace from Mexico.

Although the Pifion Jay (Gymnorhinus cyanoceplalus) has been recorded as common in the pine belts of the Sierra Juarez and the Sierra San Pedro Mgrtir of Baja California, apparently it has never been taken in any other part of Mexico. While checking a recent accession of material from Mexico, Dr. John Davis found a ‘female (Moore Coll. no. 50497) collected by Chester C. Lamb on June 10, 1949, seventeen miles east of La Junta, Chihuahua, at 7500 feet altitude. Mr. Lamb’s colleccting station was about 230 miles south of the Mexican border and therefore this occurrence constitutes a considerable extension of the range of the species. The date of its capture, June 10, is somewhat surprising, but as the gonads were described as “small” by the collector, this date may not be significant.- ROBERT T. MOORE, Laboratory of Zoology, Occidental College, Eagle Rock, California, September 26, 1950.

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