Pseudoscolopax semipalmatus, Jerd.
Vernacular Names.—[None.]
HE Snipc-billcd Godwit has been so seldom observed
within our limits that it may be well to mention
every instance of its occurrence that has come to
my notice.
About the close of 1844 Jerdon procured the
type in the Madras market. On December the 12th,
1847, Blyth procured one in the Calcutta market.
Colonel McMaster writes : " I have killed it in January, (? 1863)
near Rangoon, feeding close to the Whimbrcl (Numenius
pftccopus,) and the Stilt {Himantopus Candidas.)"
On the 28th September (? 1876) Mr. Oates obtained two
specimens, a male and a female, near the mouth of the Sitang in
Lower Pegu, and on the 13th of December 187S I purchased
three specimens in the flesh (one male and two females) in the
Calcutta market, which had been captured in a bird-net thirteen
miles south-cast of Calcutta.
Besides these instances, Colonel Graham writes that he has
shot " a few" in Eastern Assam ; but I am by no means sure
that my kind friend has correctly identified the species. No
one else at any rate has ever met with this species in Assam,
but it would be extremely likely to occur there on passage.
Outside our limits it has been procured at Poutianak in
Borneo (two specimens by Diard), and it has occurred in China,
but is probably rare there. I do not gather that Pere David
himself ever met with it, but Swinhoe says he procured two
specimens—one in partially moulted plumage, in autumn
at Hankow, Central China, the other in full summer plumage
from the neighbourhood of Tientsin.
Verreaux received a specimen from Daun'a, and not
recognizing it in its rufous summer garb, renamed it Micropalma,
tacsanowskia. For years Dybowski failed to meet with it in
Darasun, and the neighbourhood of Lake Baikal ; but he
notified the existence of one specimen in the Irkutsk Museum,
obtained somewhere in the neighbourhood, and of another at
Warsaw which had been procured near Chita the capital (?) of