78



Mr. G. A. Heumann,



culprit that lays his egg in their nest. The peaceful doves are

much in evidence, their cooing call from the top of trees sounds

from everywhere. In one of the big gum trees in my paddock

a peewit is already setting, and a pair of black - faced cuckoo

shrikes are every morning busily inspecting which tree might suit

them best for their home. A pair of little ground diamonds are

just beginning to make the burrow for their nest in one of the

trenches in my garden. These are exceptionally sweet little birds,

their call note is very sad. A pair of them have for years made a

nest in a staghorn hung up under the verandah in the house of a

friend and never minded people coming and going by them. The

curlews on my lawn are now mournfully screeching their love song,

and the spurwing and little black-breasted plovers join them in the

concert. The cries of the cagous could raise the dead, and it is a

good thing that we have no immediate neighbours. Wild jackasses

come to visit our tame ones and to laugh with them from fence and

trees. The little blue wrens, up to lately travelling in big families

of a dozen or more, are now split up into pairs. One pair has

stayed in our shrubbery and we know where their nest will be.


Already the beautiful note of the blood-bird high up on the

gum trees, where the first spring blossoms have opened, floats

through the air. Sometimes the mating call of the mistletoe birds

reach the ear as they fly high up almost invisible to the eye and

give proof of how far reaching these mating calls are. Watching

a number of honey-suckers in the garden of my friend the other

day I was interested in a number of New-Hollands which had come

probably from quite a long distance to inspect the Warratahs which

usually bloom in September. Not being out yet I noticed one of

the birds trying to assist the flower petals to open out by manipu¬

lating them by his long slenderly curved bill. The remarkable thing

is that Warratahs are wild flowers, indigenous to the Australian

scrub, seldom cultivated in a garden. Around Sydney — within

many miles — they are destroyed, and yet, when this little patch

which I speak of is in bloom, quite a number of species of honey-

suckers come to have a drink. What memory these birds must

have to recall that last year this time they had visited this spot,

found it good and so come again and again as the season comes



