568 The Birds of Paradise. 



plumage of the male. The toj) of the head and back of the 

 neck are black, the rest of the upper parts rich reddish brown ; 

 while the under surface is entirely yellowish ashy, somewhat 

 blackish on the breast, and crossed throughout with narrow 

 blackish wavy bands. 



The Seleucides alba is found in the island of Salwatty, and 

 in the north-western parts of New Guinea, where it frequents 

 flowering trees, especially sago-palms and pandani, sucking the 

 flowers, round and beneath which its unusually large and pow- 

 erfu.1 feet enable it to cling. Its motions are very rapid. It 

 seldom rests more than a few moments on one tree, after which 

 it flies straight off, and with great swiftness, to another. It 

 has a loud shrill cry, to be heard a long way, consisting of 

 " Cab, cah," repeated five or six times in a descending scale, 

 and at the last note it generally flies away. The males are 

 quite solitary in their habits, although, perhaps, they assemble 

 at certain times like the true paradise birds. All the speci- 

 mens shot and opened by my assistant Mr. Allen, who obtain- 

 ed this fine bird during his last voyage to New Guinea, had 

 nothing in their stomachs but a brown sweet liquid, probably 

 the nectar of the flowers on which they had been feeding. 

 They certainly, however, eat both fruit and insects, for a speci- 

 men which I saw alive on board a Dutch steamer ate cock- 

 roaches and papaya fruit voraciously. This bird had the curi- 

 ous habit of resting at noon with the bill pointing vertically 

 upward. It died on the passage to Batavia, and I secured the 

 body and formed a skeleton, which shows indisputably that 

 it is really a bird of paradise. The tongue is very long and 

 extensible, but flat and a little fibrous at the end, exactly Hke 

 the true Paradiseas. 



In the island of Salwatty, the natives search in the forests 

 till they find the sleeping place of this bird, which they know 

 by seeing its dung upon the ground. It is generally in a low 

 bushy tree. At night they climb up the tree, and either shoot 

 the birds with blunt arrows, or even catch them alive with a 

 cloth. In New Guinea they are caught by placing snares on 

 the trees frequented by them, in the same way as the red par- 

 adise birds are caught in Waigiou, and which has already 

 been described at page 536. 



The great Epimaque, or Long-tailed Paradise Bird (Epi- 



