1 92 1.] Western Australian Birds. 61 



near the Lyndon River ; a female bird was sitting on 

 the egg. I concluded that the other young birds had been 

 safely hatched out, and gone away with another feniide. 

 The nest was about a foot from the ground, made of fine 

 grasses and partly domed, and looked as if it had seen a 

 lot of wear. 



Leggeornis lamberti occidentalis. 



Western Blue-breasted Wrens were not plentiful about 

 Carnarvon in 1911 and 1913, but very numerous from there 

 to the North-West (-ape, from early June to Septeml)er in 

 1916. A party of fledged young, with the parent birds, 

 were seen feeding upon insects in heaps of dry seaweed on 

 the beach at Carnarvon on 25 September. These birds are 

 constantly seen feeding in dense mangroves, where insect 

 life is abundant. I shot a full-plumaged male in mangroves 

 one day, and saw it fall, evidently dead, a few yards 

 from me. When I reached the place, the bird had dis- 

 appeared. The same thing happened again, and I began 

 to look into some of the numerous holes of the crabs that 

 were plentiful under the mangroves, thinking the Wren 

 might have fallen into one of them, and saw u crab backing 

 down its burrow and draooino- the bird after it. I at once 

 thrust my hand in, but it was too large for the cavity, and 

 though I eventually forced the full length of my hand 

 and arm down, the crab got away with its booty. On 

 another occasion I shot a Zosteroj^s halstoni in mangroves, 

 and keeping my eye fixed on it as it lay dead, I saw it 

 suddenly disappear by being seized by a crab from below. 



As previously stated in this paper, I once saw a Whistling 

 Eagle pick up a Stilt before me, as it floated dead on a pool 

 of water ; and another time a Tree-Creeper (^Climacteris) 

 that fell into some scrub was snapped up by a lurking 

 Monitor (large lizard), which disputed (unsuccessfully) 

 my right to the bird ; and 1 have seen dead ducks pulled 

 below the surface of the water in lakes by freshwater 

 turtles, before the birds could be retrieved — but this " crab- 

 smitching" was quite a new thing. 



