MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 521> 



forwards examined carefully every tree. In about a quarter of an hour 1 

 found the nest some ten or twelve feet above the ground, built close against 

 the trunk of one of the trees (a Blue Gum). I was unable to climb the tree 

 as the branches were too thin to support my weight, so I hurried back to my 

 bungalow for some ladders, expecting after all the fuss the bird had made to 

 find at least young birds, I was quite wrong, the nest was only half built. 

 Thinking that perhaps this was not after all the nest belonging to the shrikes 

 which objected so much to my dog, I searched in every other tree in the 

 plantation, but could not find any other nest. To make quite certain I went 

 out the next day alone and watched, and I saw both birds frequently fly in and 

 out of the tree which contained the half built nest. 



Now, had the bird been capable of exercising any intelligence, would it 

 have constantly drawn our attention to the whereabouts of its nest, by 

 scolding a dog which never took the least notice of its ridiculous antics ? The 

 first time it might have been suddenly frightened by the appearance of a 

 strange monster under the tree it had selected for the home of its future 

 young, and involuntarily cried out, and attempted to drive it away, in the 

 same way that a very young child will involuntarily cry out when suddenly 

 alarmed, even at objects which are quite inanimate and ob\iously to us, could 

 not possibly do it any harm. 



Why then should it after the first time of seeing the dog, when it discovered 

 that it took absolutely no notice of it, and never attempted to touch its half 

 formed home which was out of reach, continue day after day to attack the 

 dog (sometimes long before it was even near the plantation) which it would 

 have known had it been able to reason, could not climb trees, was obviously 

 looking for something on the ground, and thereby draw the attention of two 

 humans who could cUmb trees ? 



There was certainly no intelligancc exhibited by this bird, neither can I 

 believe it was solely instinct which so disastrously misled it to expose the one 

 place it wished to conceal. 



I think that in this case the bird must have been in the first instance so 

 intent on doing something to its nest, that it neither saw nor heard the dog 

 approach the tree it was building in, and then suddenly catching sight of it 

 beneath, was so frightened that whenever it saw the dog again, associated it 

 with something to be alarmed at, in the same way that the dog always 

 associated that particular enclosure with a cat it had once discovered there, 

 but never subsequently found there again. 



My opinion of the above is comfirmed by the fact that, at about the same 

 time in a disused compound about a quarter of a mile away, another pair of 

 shrikes behaved in exactly a similar way, but on this occasion devoted 

 all their attention to us, and left the dog severely alone. In the former 

 case had the bird been able to reason, although instinct prompted it to 

 behave as it did, it would have suppressed its fright for fear of attracting 

 our attention to its nest, being the ones who could do it real harm, and 



