BRED IN CAPTIVITY

Evening Post, Volume CXXII, Issue 70, 19 September 1936, Page 25

BRED IN CAPTIVITY

LYRE-BIRD ACHIEVEMENT (From "The Post's" Representative;) SYDNEY, September 1. ■ Sydney ornithologists regard as a notable avicultural achievement the hatching of a lyre-bird chick in cap-' tivity at the home of Mr. J. Coyle, of Springwood, on the Blue Mountains. This is the 'first known -time that lyrebirds have bred in captivity. The lyre-bird, the world's master mimic, and shy , denizen of wooded gullies in South-eastern Australia, is becoming rarer and rarer as settle-' ment spreads and brings the racket and noise of humanity to the bush. A few years ago Mr., Coyle sought and obtained official permission to keep lyre-birds irt captivity at his mountain home, the protective law for native fauna forbidding this in ordinary circumstances. He built a large wirenetting enclosure and introduced to it a pair of the birds taken from one of the mountain gullies. The pair became, sufficiently tame to perch on the knees and shoulders of strangers when' food was offered them.

The arrival of the baby lyre-bird marks the-culmination of this considerable, effort at home-study and- preservation of the species. No' one has been permitted to go ,near the birds .for some weeks past. On two or three occasions- previously the birds showed their resentment of the lack of privacy in their domestic affairs by tearing their large domed nest to fragments after the egg was laid. Then on another-occasion, a nest was robbed, presumably by- a rat. When the present nest was built in- a thick tree, within the enclosure visitors were discouraged from getting more than a distant view of the. birds from the. yard, and the birds were left to carry on incubation undisturbed. The nest comprised a barrow-load of sticks and similar material. The hen has . now become "frontpage" news after weeks of tedious sitting on' a single egg. Clad in sooty down, and with strong legs and claws on which, in the wild, it would have to rely to secure'food in later life, and having a lusty appetite, the young one was heralded on arrival by much manifestation of parental excitement.