156 MELIPHAGID^. 



The note of the Warty-faced Honey-eater is a ringing metallic "clink-clank," and is 

 frequently accompanied with a peculiar bowing of the head, also a clattering noise during flight, 

 as if the wings were repeatedly being struck against each other. 



Its food consists of the nectar and pollen of flowers, and insects. To this diet is frequently 

 added cultivated fruits, principally figs and plums, also grapes. When once these birds sample 

 a fruit they are very persistent in their endeavours to obtain it. At his residence at Springwood, 

 on the Blue Mountains, the late Hon. Dr. James Norton, M.L.C., showed me a heavily-laden fig- 

 tree in his orchard, thickly enveloped with netting, through the meshes of which a week before, he 

 informed me, a Warty-faced Honey-eater had squeezed its way. Capturing the bird, although 

 much damage had been done to the fruit, he thought it too beautiful to kill and restored it to 

 liberty. Notwithstanding this, for the two following days the bird made vain attempts to again 

 force its way through the netting. 



From Copmanhurst in the Upper Clarence River District, New South Wales, Mr. George 

 Savidge writes me: — '-During my twenty years' residence here, I have only once met with 

 Meliphciga phrygin. It was during a long spell of drought when a small flock settled on the top- 

 most branches of a willow-tree in my garden." 



Mr. J. C. Mclntyre brought two specimens to the Australian Museum on the 13th July, 

 1905, and informed me that this species was not known locally at Muswellbrook, where it had 

 lately appeared in large flocks, and was doing damage to the orchards. 



Accompanying the specimen lent by Mr. Edwin Ashby was the following note: — "Mcliphaga 

 phrygia nest near Blackwood in South Australia. In 1904 1 watched a pair feeding their 

 young here. The old birds when uttering their note or double note have a peculiar swaying or 

 bobbing motion, the head being stretched forward as if to assist in the production of their call." 



The nest is a cup-shaped thick-walled structure, externally formed of strips of bark held 

 together with a slight addition of cobweb and lined inside with fine dried grasses and shreds of 

 bark. Nests now before me, taken at Ashfield and Belmore, near Sydney, have soft dried 

 flowering stems worked into the outer portion of the structure, and the lining of the sides 

 consisted entirely of the thread-like leaves of Casunrina subnvsa, with a thick layer of shreds of 

 red stringy-bark at the bottom of the structure only. An average nest measures externally four 

 inches in diameter by two inches and a half in depth, the inner cup measuring two inches and a 

 half in diameter by two inches in depth. Usually it is built between a thick upright forked 

 branch, and frequently in the first fork at the top of a long rough-barked stem of a tree, also in 

 slightly leaning upright forks, or on the top of a horizontal branch, as a rule a large portion of 

 the structure being concealed. The heiglit at which the nest is placed varies considerably. At 

 Ashfield I had one under observation that could be seen from my window, and this nest, in which 

 the young were successfully reared was fully sixty feet from the ground. The average altitude 

 is from fifteen to thirty feet. The lowest positions I have seen the nests of this species was at 

 Belmore near Sydney. One taken on the 14th August, 1898, containing two fresh eggs was 

 built in the first thick fork of an Ironbark ten feet from the ground, the other taken on the 28th 

 August, also containing two fresh eggs was seven feet from the ground, and placed on the top 

 of a stem of a Melaleuca which had been cut off and the nest partially held in position by a 

 number of thin dead stems. The position of the nest of this species as figured by Gould in his 

 folio edition of the "Birds of Australia" ■" is misleading; it is never built on a slender thin 

 forked branch as there represented. 



The eggs are usually two in number for a sitting — on one occasion only have I found three — 

 oval in form, the shell being close-grained, smooth and slightly lustrous. They are of a rich 

 reddish-buff ground colour, becoming gradually darker towards the thicker end, and have 



* Gould, Bds. Austr., fol. ed., Vol. IV., pi. 48 11848). 



