Andkrsen. — Jew Zealand Bird-sonf/. 



393 



times with a small wooden mallet very quickly and very lightly. The effect 

 of this note was extraordinarily sweet and plaintive, the whole theme of five 

 notes coming like the rich voice of a contralto singing whilst on the point of 

 tears. Sometimes the place of this fifth note was taken by a note slurred 

 from e flat to d — a note without the bell sound, but with one more approach- 

 ing that of the unwinding of a sharply jerked fishing-reel. I heard only one 

 bird sing these notes ; it sat but 6 ft. or 8 ft. above me. singing parts or 

 the whole of the theme for some considerable time. ' Each pair of notes 

 took about a second. The bird was of beautiful bright-green colour, much 

 brighter than the duller olive of the other bell-birds seen — more of a parra- 

 keet green. The plumage along its sides was rather raggled and ruffled. 

 Its entire body seemed to enter into the production of the notes, contract- 

 ing all along the sides on the emission of each one, the neck being stretched 

 out and the beak sUghtly open. It turned from side to side, singing one 

 note to the left, one to the front, one to the right irregularly, turning through 

 a semicircle, as though before an audience, unseen by me, of Haku-turi or 

 Nuku-mai-tore. It raised the body with each note, as though to eject them 

 with a jerk in the case of the first four, and to pour out the sound of the fifth, 

 the vibrating bell. An ordinarily coloured and smaller bell-bird appeared 

 to be its companion during part of the time I saw it. I saw it again on the 

 following day, when the vocalization of the notes was as in (20c) and (20d) ; 

 again, as before, the final closed consonants were not breathed on. The 

 theme was even more musical than on the day before, the ttirr of (20c) being 

 entirely bell-like. The quality of this bird's song was quite different from 

 that of any other bell-bird ever heard by me, and its beauty impressed me 

 much more than even that of the sweetest tui song. In (21) the notes were 

 a sharp incisive whistle, and so of its variant (21a), which occupied less than 

 a second in utterance. The second of the first four notes in (21a) was some- 

 times replaced by a rest of equal duration, and sometimes the first four 

 were preceded by a click. 



The Fantail. 



Five fantails, three black and two pied, came to call, tweeting and flirt- 

 ing and displaying their beauties, all practically within touch ; the phrase 

 (6), sung quickly several times in succession, was the one most often used. 

 In (7) the twi was the constricted sound — the i short as in "hit" — -but 



. fr,'frrrg^ ^ U^^J^ji4 



( ll) SS/2 (/Z) /SSI2 



P^^& 



the twee of the g was more open and sweet. This song was continued for half 

 a minute without break ; not always in the order of the notes given, but in 

 various combinations of those sounds. The bird still flirted about whilst 

 singing, hopping restlessly here and there. 



On the 10th January 1912, a fantail came to call whose body above and 

 below was a beautiful dark brown, wing and tail feathers black. It was in 



