Nesting and Rearing of Landrails in Captivity. 29 



before; which. Job himself might have been reasonably ex- 

 pected to quail. In the stillness of such a night, I do not 

 believe, that there is anything on earth that can equal the 

 nerve racking inonolony of this awful " creek craik " " creek- 

 craik " repeated ad infinitum without pause or break or the 

 remotest variation, except in the volume and direction of the 

 sound, which advances and recedes, in fact appears to come 

 from all points of the compass. These ventriloquia! powers, 

 which appear to be especially pronounced at night, are apt 

 to cause one, as they often did me at tirst, to imagine that 

 the bird has in some way or other managed to escape or that 

 a wild bird is around answering the cries of the one in ihe 

 av'.ary. . (Jflen whilst standing at my bedroom window in the 

 evening, I .would have cheerfully laid any odds that the bird 

 was on the lawn within, at the most, ten or fifteen yards 

 of tho windou'^ whereas, in reality, the aviary from which it 

 was serenading all and sundry, was situated from eighty to 

 one- hundred yards away at the end of a paddock. From my 

 further experiences of these birds this summer (191 5.).. how- 

 ever, 1 rather fancy the cock 1 possessed before must have been 

 a sort of combined Caruso and Arthur Prince amongst his 

 fellows, and by no means a normal performer. 



To resume the chronicle of nesting results last (1914) 

 season, it was not until August 6th that I discovered th/c 

 nest containing two eggs, most cunningly concealed under a 

 tuft of grass. The nest itself is a very prhnitive atiair juot 

 a few bits of dried grass roughly lining a natural hollow .-n 

 the ground. 



I felt sure they had a nest somewhere and was en- 

 gaged in searching for it, but had almost given up the search 

 when in lifting up an o\'erhanging tussock of grass, I almost 

 |jut my hand on the hen, which was sitting like a stone. 



On \isiting the nest again on the 1 2ih I found it 

 deserted and one egg had been dexoured, save for a bit of 

 the shell, by held mice, by which creatures I was much pest- 

 ered that year. 1 caught the culprit a few days later in an 

 ordinary wooden mouse trap, which I set for him on the site 

 of liio depreciations, lie proved to be a monstrous mouse, 

 liardly to be wondered at considermg the sumptuous manner 



