88 RECORDS OF THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM. 



greatest pleasures enjoyed by the late celebrated botanist Robert 

 Brown, during the last thirty years of his life, was now and then 

 to show me a drawing of a Parrakeet made by one of the brothers 

 Bauer, from a specimen procured somewhere on the north coast 

 of Australia, but of which no specimen was preserved at the time, 

 and none had been sent to England, until several were brought 

 home by Mr. Elsey, a year or two prior to Mr. Brown's death. 

 On comparing these with the drawing made a least forty years 

 before, no doubt remained on my mind as to its having been made 

 from an example of this species. This, then, is one of the novelties 

 for which we are indebted to the explorations of A. C. Gregory Esq. 

 and I trust it may not be the last I shall have to characterize 

 through the researches of this intrepid traveller. Mr. Elsey, who, 

 as is well known, accompanied the expedition to the Victoria 

 River, obtained three examples— a male, a female, and a young bird 

 — allof whicharenowinour national collection. In the notes accom- 

 panying the specimens, Mr. Elsey states that they were procured on 

 the 14th of September 1856, in Lat. 18° S. and Long. 141° 33' E., 

 and that their crops contained some monocotyledonous seeds." 



Since the above passage was written by Gould, so far as I am 

 aware, no additional information has been recorded of Psephotus 

 chrysopterygius, the rarest of all our Australian Parrakeets, and 

 the three specimens in the British Museum obtained by Mr. Elsey 

 in 1856 were the only ones known. It was therefore with extreme 

 pleasure that when passing one of the bird dealer's shops near 

 Circular Quay, in November 1897, my attention was arrested by 

 a living specimen of the Golden-shouldered Parrakeet, the first I 

 had seen, and previously known to me only by Gould's description 

 and figure. On making inquiries I found that it had l)een caught 

 by a bird-catcher in his nets about three months before in the 

 neighbourhood of Port Darwin, in the Northern Territory, and 

 was the only specimen that he had ever seen. Subsequently it 

 was acquired by the Trustees, and has since enlivened my room 

 with its cheerful notes. It bears confinement well and is exceed- 

 ingly tame, except to strangers, feeding entirely on millet seed 

 and leaving untouched the canary seed with which it is mixed. 

 Like other members of this genus — which I have seen wade into 

 water to quench their thirst — it partakes freely of water. One 

 note of this species repeated several times at intervals of a second 

 apart is exceedingly sharp and shrill, and resembles the metallic 

 sound produced by quickly turning an unoiled key in a new and 

 close fitting lock. The remainder of its notes which are continued 

 for some time, is like the warbling of the Grass Parrakeet, 

 Melopsittacus undulatus, only much louder. This specimen 

 measures ten inches, and from the brilliancy of its plumage is 

 evidently an adult male. Gould's central figure of the male of 

 this species in his " Supplement to the Birds of Australia,"* is too 



* Gould— Suppl. Bds. Austr., pi. 64 (1869). 



