^^j'^ O'DoNor.TiuK, Nnfr.'; nil Vir/orian lA't'c-liird. ii 



NOTES ON THE VICTORIAN LYRE-BIRD, MENURA 

 VICTORIM, Old. 



By J. G. O'DoNOGHUE. 



{Read before the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria, gth March, 1914.) 



The colonization of Victoria, in common with the other 

 territorial divisions of the Commonwealth, has been fraught 

 with far-reaching and serious consequences to its fauna and 

 flora. Wherever the white man established a settlement he 

 at once began to effect radical changes in his surroundings 

 and to gather about him, either from essential or sentimental 

 motives, the animals and vegetation common to the country 

 whence he came. By drainage and tillage, and by extensive 

 clearing and ring-barking, numbers of indigenous plants and 

 trees were destroyed, the source of sustenance and of shelter 

 of an equally large and varied number of indigenous insects 

 and animals. In the struggle for existence that of necessity 

 ensued, by reason of the restriction of their area of active 

 operations, those of either class that survived were later 

 brought into competition with the alien plants and animals 

 he directly or indirectly introduced, with unfavourable results. 



Possibly the practical annihilation of many of our fauna 

 is in a great measure due more directly to man than to the 

 animals he naturalized. Directly, he is responsible for the 

 rapid disappearance of the Bustard and Wedge-tailed Eagle 

 by means of poison he largely uses to suppress, in some 

 measure, the rabbit, which, here freed from the restrictions 

 imposed upon its increase by those predaceous animals with 

 which it was associated in the Old World, multiplies to such, 

 an extent as to become a menace to successful farming and 

 grazing. Indirectly, he is responsible for the sad havoc now 

 being wrought amongst our indigenous birds by the fox he 

 introduced to chase, red-coated and horsed, across country 

 with a pack of hounds. 



One, the Lyre-bird, the subject of this paper, will soon be, 

 principally owing to this scourge, a thing of the past. Already 

 authentic information records its total disappearance from 

 some favourable localities and its rapidly decreasing numbers 

 in others. It behoves us, then, when afforded opportunities, 

 to study the habits and peculiarities of this unique bird whilst 

 its epitaph remains unwritten. 



The following brief notes are contri])uted to that end. They 

 merely constitute, in part, what came under my daily notice 

 during a residence of twelve months, or thereabouts, in the 

 Crooked River district. North Gippsland, where the birds were 

 as numerous as sparrows or starlings in the suburbs of Mel- 

 bourne, and deal with some of the contentious points that 



