22 president's address. 



birds." It is much to be regretted that \Mr. Perkins does not 

 give full particulars of these observations. Just as in many 

 other cases, we have no information beyond the fact that the 

 birds visit the flowers. 



A note of interest is to be found in the method cniplo3'ed by 

 the hunters in the old days for taking Drepanis pacifica — the 

 Mamo — the bird from which the yellow feathers used in the 

 ancient feather-work was procured. The hunter covered himself 

 with the branches and leaves of a tubular-flowered plant, and 

 held, between finger and thumb, one of the flowers. AVhen tlie 

 bird inserted its bill, he closed his finger and thumb together, 

 and thus captured it. The birds and flowei's of Hawaii offer a 

 unique opportunity to a field-naturalist to enrich our knowledge 

 of bird-pollination. 



Scott Elliott has published two papers on bird-pollination in 

 South Africa(12). He mentions Protea incompta, P. mellifera, P. 

 lepidocarjxi, P. longifolia, P. grmidifioi-a, P. cordata, P. SGolyvius, 

 Leucospertnum conocarpiis, and L. nutans as being fertilised by 

 the birds Promerops cafer and Nectarinia chalyhea. 



Bertha Stoneman, in her bright little book on South African 

 plants and their ways, mentions the pollination of Gladiolus and 

 Loranthus by the Nectarinia?. But no details as to method are 

 given. 



A good deal of observational work has been done in New- 

 Zealand on pollination by birds. l)arwin(14) quotes Potts (Trans. 

 N.Z. Inst.) as follows: "In New Zealand, many specimens of the 

 Anthoi'nis me/anura had their heads coloured with pollen from 

 the flowers of an endemic species of Fuchsia." Wallace gives a 

 list of Australian and New Zealand flowers pollinated by birds(l5), 

 and says, "The great extent to which insect and bird agency is 

 necessary to flowers is well shown by the case of New Zealand. 

 The entire counti-y is comparatively poor in species of insects, 

 especially in bees and butterflies, which are the chief flowei*- 

 fertilisers; yet, according to the researches of local botanists, no 

 less than one-fourth of all the flowering plants are incapable of 

 self-fertilisation, and, therefore, wholly dependent on insect and 

 bird agency for the continuance of the species. ' 



