PARROTS AND FISHES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 260, 2 November 1929, Page 13 (Supplement)

PARROTS AND FISHES.

There are two unmatchable exhibitions of colours in the world that render drab and tame all other colour displays. One is at Honolulu, the other in Sydney, Australia. Each is a group of natural creatures, the more impressive because they are mingled together, scores of them, in all shapes and pigmentary combinations. In Sydney, at the charming Taronga Zoological Gardens, is an aviary of parrots. There may be twenty varieties together, from Asia, Australasia, Africa, and South America. Every possible combination of every thinkable colour tone, ranging from the plain and simple to the utmost grotesqueness, flutters and darts about in a riot of lavish beauty, admirably set off by the lush, all but tropic greenery of the gardens. The other display is at the famous Hawaiian aquarium in Honolulu, where the most striking collection of coloured fishes in the world is collected. Here queerness of shape and appendage; no less than chromatic brilliance, are equally fascinating. Were a skilled artist to spend days making fish outlines with all the bizarre variations he could imagine, then proceed to colour them with every conceivable combination of pigments, and in endless patterns he could not outdo these models. Pied thick fish, striped slender fish, flecked short fish, all tinted mother-of-pearl, blue, Cathay yellow, ruby red, opal pink, blood orange—and hues nameless and baffling.