282 On Fiji parrot-finches and other South Sea Island matters.


blind or not. Altogether one meets with some curious freaks of

nature, as it were, in these islands.


However, to come back to birds. I had taken great pride in

a small collection of honeysuckers which did well on Mr. Ezra’s

prescription for feeding them ; they are very tiny with long slender

bills, a sort of sooty black colour with a scarlet crown or a red

patch on the throat. Alack and alas ! they were killed, after having

got them as far as Sydney, through the man dropping the box. I

noticed also a most beautiful flycatcher, rufous breast and blue

back, head and tail.


I tried hard to catch a pair of masked wood swallows, but

whilst being plentiful enough, they seemed to fly very high, and

with insect life teeming and no birds to reduce the pest, of course

they never attempted to come to a bait, however nicely dished up

to them. I am very fond of these birds and when going over again,

providing the war has not ruined me altogether, I shall take an

Australian wood swallow with me to try my luck that way.


It is remarkable how few birds there are in the Island, almost

no soft-billed birds at all, though I was told that up in the moun¬

tains there are some lovely species, one of them being, or supposed to

be, a parrot-finch, yellow with red head. I have my doubts, but if all

goes well I shall try and go up as soon as I get the chance.


It is strange that these South Sea Islands, with all their

beauty in plant life, are so barren in birds. Reading of Tahity, for

instance, as the Pearl of the South Seas, one would expect to find

there also some fine birds. Dreams of humming birds, etc. float

through one’s mind and that sort of thing and yet there is abso¬

lutely nothing there that could be useful as an aviary bird. A friend

was telling me of two species of beautiful birds that were supposed

to inhabit the Island and I had visions of a new species of

parrot-finch at least, yet picture my disgust when, motoring right

out to locate some, I struck, not a beautiful parrot-finch, but a flock

of hundreds of redheads which I can trap in my paddock near

Sydney. The other species turned out to be a chestnut finch, also

from Australia. It seems that these finches were introduced from

Australia and have increased in great numbers and that is all that

is there. In Paratonga, Tanga, Samoa, etc. you find just as little,



