CORRESPONDENCE,

Otago Witness, Issue 2779, 19 June 1907, Page 13

CORRESPONDENCE,

J., Rimu, sends an interesting note on the cuckoos, and I shall be glad, as I have said before, if others will send in bird notes. Ornithology is a subject I know very little about, but I am sure there are scores bf readers who can tell us a great deal. I had the pleasure of hearing Dr Fulton's able advocacy on behalf of our birds, and I am sure that the gun fiend who brags of his " bags " would have squirmed had he heard the doctor scathingly denunciate him for his senseless slaughter.

One of our teachers had a specimen copy sent -him of "Birds and Nature," an American monthly, and has sent it to me. It i« full of good things, and one of these days I'll give my readers some of its contents. One article read by two pupils in this teacher's school is called " A Bird's-eye View," and I am sure they must have enjoyed it. J's reference to birds and moths brought to my mind two or three paragraphs in " Wild Life in Australia " referring to the wholesale destruction of these forms of animal life by bush fires and heavy winds. The author is quoting from the Argus : — " The morning after the fire I went for a stroll along the beach as far as the jetty, and was astonished to find hundreds of wild birds, of all sizes and colours, lying stranded on the beach at high-water mark. I should think that the line of birds extended more or less thickly for 500 yards. I was fairly satisfied that every bird- indigenous to the locality was among the poor drowned birds. Evidently in their half-dazed and half-suffo-cated condition they had lowered their flight, and once they touched the surface of the ocean it was all over with them." He rest is in. the author's own words : —

" In the same way, when a plague of moths • (generally the Agrostis spina) occurs in Victoria, a strong north wind will blow millions into the* sea, where they are drowned. I, have seen ridges of dead moths several inches high on the beach at highwater mark."

But my heading at present is "Correspondence." From a teacher in the Hawke'e Bay district I have received six eight-line stanzas of a composition of his own recited at a meeting held in the school to celebrate Empire Day. I have devoted a fair amount of space to Empire Day during the last month, and I may later on refer to what has been done in other parts of the Empire. It is not advisable at present to give any more space- to the subject. Had the composition been the work of a pupil, or. bad it possesed unusual merit, I might have stretched a point. Last week I gave the first instalment of a quoted article "Stories in Patterns." In it the statement was made that one pattern was named the "Meander" by the Assyrians from the river Maeander that flowed through their land. A correspondent, in, thanking me for my "deeply if foresting rotes," points out that the Maeander was not in Assyria, but in Asia Minor, and that it fell into tho -lEgean Sea.. My Assyrian history is hazy, so whether the Empire of Assyria, say after the capture of Jerusalem, ever extended as far as the Maeander I cannot say ; nor . can I say whether the Assyrians gave it that name or not. In any cese^ that is a detail that in no way lessong the value of. the stories as told in the patterns. lam glad, however, that attention has been drawn to the statement the writer of the a -tide baa made. Since penning the above I have locked tip the article on Assyria in> the 7£nc?-lo-pafrclia Britanniea. There I road in effect: "In 745 B.C. Pulu, or Pul, seized tl.c throne and inaugurated a new and a vigorous policy. Under him and his sucee^ors arose the second Assyrian Empire, which finally included the whole crvilised world." Was it at this tima the Meander was named?— Magisteb. Dear " Magißtar," — I am obliged to Professor Benham for his information on the thre« inseots I sent you", and although I never caught the Painted Lady in Scotland, I thought it was it as I have seen one in different collections, and thought it might be here, for I have caught a Cumberwell butterfly (Vanessa antiope) in East India 12 miles below Garden Reach on the Hugli River. I collected" butterflies and moths p.t Home and in India, but do not do co here. My reason for looking after the common moth (Nycteniera) is this: It is the food of the bionze cuckoo, so I wanted to know if it were the want of food that drove the cuckoo away, — but it is not, for the cuckoo is migratory : it must go. You asked me a few weeks ago if it was possible to know when it left. It is not. We might say it has" left when it stops cal! : ng I do not think it knows itself when it is going to leave nor yet -where it is goirp; But go it must, when its time comes, whether by night or by day. It goes not in flocks, — not even in pairs. They may come in contact with one another, but they might not fly 10 minutes •together, as they do not incline to keep together, and their scope is great. We would naturally think they would go with a full stomach, but this is not the case. And 1 ■will tell you how I have found them at this stage. They are so very small and very hard that there seems to be little space for food. At other times they are very large and high, this being the cause of an unhatcher. I examined the stomach of a longtailed cuckoo just before leaving rs it seemed very uneasy. Its stomach was very smfll ana hard, and contained about a dosen " hopper legs. They were so hard pressed that they were imprinted in the stomach. — J , Rimu.