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. In
studying the peculiarities of the Celebesian fauna, it will therefore be well to
consider only the productions of the main island.
The number of land birds in the island of Celebes is 128, and from these we
may, as before, strike out a small number of species which roam over the whole
Archipelago (often from India to the Pacific), and which therefore only serve to
disguise the peculiarities of individual islands. These are 20 in number, and
leave 108 species which we may consider as more especially characteristic of the
island. On accurately comparing these with the birds of all the surrounding
countries, we find that only nine extend into the islands westward, and nineteen
into the islands eastward, while no less than 80 are entirely confined to the
Celebesian fauna—a degree of individuality which, considering the situation of
the island, is hardly to be equalled in any other part of the world. If we still more
closely examine these 80 species, we shall be struck by the many peculiarities of
structure they present, and by the curious affinities with distant parts of the