I Myself Assiduously Collected Birds In Celebes
For Nearly Ten Months, And My Assistant, Mr. Allen, Spent Two
Months In The Sula Islands.
The Dutch naturalist Forsten spent
two years in Northern Celebes (twenty years before my visit), and
collections of birds had also been sent to Holland from Macassar.
The French ship of discovery, L'Astrolabe, also touched at Menado
and procured collections.
Since my return home, the Dutch
naturalists Rosenberg and Bernstein have made extensive
collections both in North Celebes and in the Sula islands; yet
all their researches combined have only added eight species of
land birds to those forming part of my own collection - a fact
which renders it almost certain that there are very few more to
discover.
Besides Salayer and Boutong on the south, with Peling and Bungay
on the east, the three islands of the Sula (or Zula) Archipelago
also belong zoologically to Celebes, although their position is
such that it would seem more natural to group them with the
Moluccas. About 48 land birds are now known from the Sula group,
and if we reject from these, five species which have a wide range
over the Archipelago, the remainder are much more characteristic
of Celebes than of the Moluccas. Thirty-one species are identical
with those of the former island, and four are representatives of
Celebes forms, while only eleven are Moluccan species, and two
more representatives.
But although the Sula islands belong to Celebes, they are so
close to Bouru and the southern islands of the Gilolo group, that
several purely Moluccan forms have migrated there, which are
quite unknown to the island of Celebes itself; the whole thirteen
Moluccan species being in this category, thus adding to the
productions of Celebes a foreign element which does not really
belong to it.
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