Feb., 1909.] THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 163 



furnishing Mr. G. Sharp with a coloured oil-painting of Newton's 

 Bower-bird, which he had prepared, and which the aborgines of 

 the Atherton district. North-eastern Queensland, instantly recog- 

 nized by the name of " Coleman." 



At a meeting of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, held 

 on the 25th November, 1908, I exhibited and described the nest 

 and eggs of Prionodu7^a newtoniana, and also exhibited a skin of 

 the female shot close to its nest. 



The first nest of Prionodura newtoniana was found by one of 

 Mr. George Sharp's blackboys on the 9th November, 1908, in 

 dense scrub about thirty miles from Atherton. It is an open 

 cup-shaped structure, formed externally of dead leaves and 

 portions of leaves, including fragments of stag-horn ferns and a 

 small quantity of dried mosses, and is lined inside at the bottom 

 with thin dead twigs. Externally it measures five inches and a 

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

 measuring four inches and a half in diameter by one inch and a 

 half in depth, and contained two fresh eggs, the female also being 

 secured. The nest was built about the centre of an irregular- 

 shaped perpendicular aperture in a tree trunk, about four feet 

 long and six inches wide, and was three feet from the ground. 

 Another nest, also containing two fresh eggs, was found in a cleft 

 in the side of a rotten, hollow tree-trunk, and above it at equal 

 distances in the same cleft w^ere two old nests of the same 

 species, the highest one being ten feet from the ground. A third 

 nest, containing also two fresh eggs, was built between the 

 buttresses of a tree about three feet from the ground. Sketches 

 showing the positions of these nests were made by Mr. Sharp and 

 sent with the eggs. Another nest, found on the 20th December, 

 1908, is externally triangular-shaped at the rim, and is much 

 deeper in form, and in addition to the leaves, portions of and 

 skeletons of leaves, is further strengthened on one side by several 

 small sticks, which are adhered together apparently by a fungoid 

 growth, now dead and dried, the inside of the structure being 

 deep, cup-shaped, and lined with thin twigs and fibrous rootlets. 

 It measures externally six inches in diameter by three inches 

 and a half in depth, the inner cup measuring three inches and a 

 half in diameter by two inches and a quarter in depth. This 

 nest was built about three feet from the ground in a buttress 

 of a fig-tree, and was supported by a number of small sticks 

 placed crosswise from the ground to the base of the nest, and 

 contained a single recently hatched young bird, which Mr. Sharp 

 took and made into a skin a week latter. Most of the nests 

 found were built in fig-trees, and contained each two eggs, but in 

 some only an incubated egg or a young bird. 



The eggs vary in form from oval to an ellipse and compressed 

 oval, the shell being finely granulate, lustrous, and typically of a 



