in S. albifacies, though some of my specimens approach it almost completely, and the face is more rufescent. Professor Newton cautiously warned Sir Walter Buller, suggesting that S. albifacies might possibly have a red "phase," like Syrnium aluco, and this North Island specimen represented the latter. As for myself, I do not think that S. albifacies has two phases, as I have seen too many specimens, and found them to vary but little. I have now in my collection eight specimens from the South Island. On the other hand, I have not seen juvenile examples; but it is very likely that the rufous face of the North Island specimen is a character peculiar to the North Island form, which would then be a sub-species of S. albifacies from the South Island, and should be called S. albifacies rufifacies. The type from Wairapara is said to have been killed in the summer of 1868-9, and, since no further evidence of its existence has come forth, I presume that the North Island race of this owl must be extinct by this time.
STRIX NEWTONI NOM. NOV.
Strix sp. Newton and Gadow, Trans. Zool. Soc. XIII, p. 287 (1893).
Messrs. Newton and Gadow give the measurements of, and describe a pair of metatarsi procured with the remains described as Strix sauzieri, and state that they do not fit in with that species. For, as they are fully adult bones, it is impossible to attribute their much smaller size to youth. They then add a sentence of which this is the first part: "Unless we assume, what is unlikely, that the Island of Mauritius possessed two different species of Strix, we have to conclude that the short pair of metatarsals belonged to a small individual of Strix sauzieri, ——." Evidently Messrs. Gadow and Newton, when they wrote this, did not remember the fact that throughout a very large portion of the range of Strix flammea, its various geographical races are found side by side with another species of the group of Strix, namely, S. candida and S. capensis, popularly called "Grass owls"; these in nearly every case have the legs considerably longer than in the true Barn Owls (Strix flammea and its races).
Therefore I consider it not in the least unlikely that two species of Strix inhabited Mauritius, and that Strix sauzieri was the Mauritian representative of the "Grass Owls," while these two short metatarsals belonged to the representative of the "Barn Owls." I therefore have much pleasure in naming this form after the collector of these bones, the late Sir Edward Newton.
Length of tarso-metatarsi, 56 mm.
Habitat: Mauritius.