BLACKCAP
buff, and the crop, sides of the breast, and flanks rather a light olive buff. Under parts and under tail-coverts are buff, and the crissum whitish. The feet are flesh colour with a tinge of lavender.
The gape is reddish flesh with a tinge of ochre, and the tongue the same colour with two dusky spots near the root.
The bill is dark horn colour, and the corner of the mouth yellow. Iris bluish black, lower eyelid ochre, and the lores slaty grey.
On leaving the egg the bird is naked, with eyelids completely sealed. The skin is flesh colour, but more lilac on the throat, back of the head, and spine, and orange red where the lungs are visible. The corner of the mouth is whitish flesh and the gape and tongue flesh colour, the latter having two light ash grey spots and a central red line. The feet are of a transparent flesh colour.
Immature.—The plumage differs only slightly from that of the adults, except that the young male has the cap dark rusty umber brown. The colour of this cap changes during the winter, and the bird returns in the spring as a rule with it black, but in some cases the change has not then reached completion, the tips of the feathers being still brown.
A dark variety in which the head, throat, and upper breast are blackish, and the remainder of the plumage much darker, has been met with in the countries bordering the Mediterranean. Madeira. Cape Verd and Canary Islands.
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION.
Through the whole of England and Wales it is generally distributed, but rather local in parts of Cornwall, Lincolnshire, Cumberland, Anglesey, and Caernarvonshire.
As a breeding species it becomes scarce in Scotland above the Firths of Clyde and Forth, being very rare in the northern parts. There are records of its occurrence from the Outer
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