132 MELIPHAGID.E. 



Mr. E. H. Lane writes me: — "Out of dozens of nests of FtUotis penuillata examined in the 

 Dubbo District, New South Wales, I have always found three eggs to be the sitting." 



Mr. A. E. Ivatt informs me that at Glanmire near Bathurst, on the loth and nth October, 

 1895. he observed flocks of these birds arriving from the west. 



Dr. W. Macgillivray writes me: — " Ptilotis peniciUata was common in the suburbs of 

 Melbourne. One of these birds used to visit my garden to feed upon the tubular flowers of a 

 Tecoma, and finding the flowers too deep for the length of the bill the corolla was in each instance 

 pierced near its base and so rifled of its honeyed store." 



The nest is a neat cup-shaped structure, outwardly formed of grasses, spiders' webs, and the 

 downy portions of dead flowers, the inside being lined with the latter material, horse-hair, and 

 occasionally with a feather or two worked into the bottom or side of the structure. An average 

 one measures e.xternally two inches and a third in diameter by two inches in depth ; the inner 

 cup measuring two inches in diameter by one inch and three-quarters in depth. The nests vary 

 in the thickness of the walls and of the materials of which they are formed. Xests received 

 from Mr. E. H. Lane, of Wambangalang Station, and accompanied with skins of the birds, were 

 formed throughout of long pieces of wiry pale green grass stems, with a slight admixture of 

 cobwebs, and were lined at the bottom only with sheep's wool. The nest is attached at the rim 

 to thin leafy drooping twigs of a tree, usually a species of Eucalyptus, Acacia, or Casuarina, and 

 frequently in one overhanging water. In public parks and gardens any suitable tree is utilized. 

 The site selected varies in height from a few feet to sixty feet from the ground. The nests and 

 eggs of this species — well known to bird-nesting boys around Melbourne, as the "Greenie" — 

 were exceedingly common in my early collecting days, and they were the first of any Honey- 

 eater's nests and eggs I found. 



The eggs are usually three, and occasionally only two in number for a sitting, oval in form, 

 the shell being close-grained, smooth, and almost lustreless. In ground colour they vary from 

 almost pure white to rich yellowish-buff, and a light red; of many sets now before me taken by 

 Mr. John Ramsay at Cardington, on the Bell River, New South Wales, bufty-white is the 

 prevailing ground colour. Some specimens are freckled and spotted uniformly over the shell 

 with reddish-chestnut, in others the markings are of a deep reddish-purple with faint underlying 

 spots of purplish-grey, predominating in some on the thicker end where an ill-defined cap or zone 

 is formed of confluent markings. Some specimens have the markings and spots rounded in 

 form, others of irregular shape. A set of three in the Australian Museum collection, taken at 

 Cardington, measures: — Length (A) 0-82 x o-6 inches; (B) 0-83 x 0-59 inches; (C) 0-82 x 

 0-59 inches. A set of three taken by Mr. E. H. Lane, on Wambangalang Station, near Dubbo, 

 New South Wales, measures: — Length (A) o-8 x 0-62 inches ; (B) o-8 x o-6i inches ; (C) o-8 

 X o-6i inches. A set of two taken by Mr. Lane on the qth November, 1892, measures: — Length 

 (A) 077 X 0-57 inches; (B) 078 x 0-57 inches. This set also contains an egg of the Pallid 

 Cuckoo found in the same nest. 



August to the end of December constitutes the usual breeding season in New South Wales 

 and Mctoria, but in the latter State I have found e;,'gs in the middle of July and a nest with 

 young, at the end of February. 



