THE NATURALIST.

Otago Witness, Issue 2499, 5 February 1902, Page 64

THE NATURALIST.

With a Camera in the Bnsli.

A well-known Australian naturalist, Mr Sidney W. Jackson, writes a delightful paper in the November number ,of Pearson's Magazine, describing his experiences when hunting for rare specimens of biids' eggs and nests in the Australian bush.

"The discovery of the nests and eggs of the magnificent rifle bird of Paradise in New South Wales was the chief event in the world of Australian naturalists a few years ago. The bird inhabits the dense scrubs, and has been known to science some 70 years. Both eggs and nests are peculiarly handsome. The eggs leok for all the world as though an artist had been trying his colour brushes on them ; they are beautifully streaked with red and violet markings, on a ground colour of delicate flesh tint.

"The wonderful nests are always decorated with cast-off snake skins, for the purpose of scaring away, by their terrible appearance, nest-robbing reptiles. They are -very skilfully hidden where the scrub is most impenetrable. In these places the climbing ladder is not often of use — it takes a man all his time to find a road for himself! We have nevei noticed the shy, timid rifle bird of Paradise to alight on tht> ground ; all its food and nest-building materials are taken from the limbs and hollows of trees.

"Another interesting inhabitant of the thick scrubs is the quaint scrub turkey, which- collects for its nest a huge mass of dead leaves and sticks on the ground, in which the eggs are carefully laid and covered over, to be hatched by the heat of the decaying vegetable matter. I have seen as many as thirty white eggs in one nest.

"In the scrub, too, builds the beautiful bower bird, whose habit it is to make a little playground for itself of thin sticks and twigs, stuck upright in the ground, and generally covered over at the top. "Inside, the bower bird's 'bower' is brightly decorated with snail shells, bits of coloured glass or china when .they can be found, coloured feathers, berries, flowers, and leaves. Here, in these happy bowers, the birds continually play, especially just before their breeding season. A watch chain, lost by a surveyor, was found in one of these bowers, and sometimes silver coins have been discovered.

"Not the least remarkable of the Australian scrub's many strange denizens is the cat bird, a grotesque and sensitive little creature, whose notes are sometimes like the purring or mewing of a cat. "The scrub is, indeed, the happy hunting ground of the naturalist."