T concealed myself yesterday, lOtli, [?Ot)i] at *.) a.m. amon« 

 some Hihisc'us shrubs and watched various birds on the tree. 

 At the end of about half an hour a small yellow bird with 

 black head arrived, perched in a clump of flowers and swooped 

 out at the first Catopsilia which came near, returning with 

 the butterfly in its beak to its perch, where, having pulled 

 off the wings one by one, it ate the body and then flew away. 

 Another bird of the same species arrived soon after and also 

 sat among the flowers, from which it swooped out on the first 

 Cafopsilia arriving to fe(?d close at hand, catching it, tearing 

 ofi the wings while on its perch and eating the body; and 

 by and by I saw it take and eat a second insect. I am not 

 quite sure how the Catopsilia was held, but think it was 

 pressed down beneath one foot on the branch while the bird 

 pulled off the wings. In each instance the body was pulled 

 into three separate bits and so eaten. I obtained some of 

 the wings of the butterfly eaten by the first bird, and some 

 from those taken by the second, and the appearances they 

 present are similar to those seen on many of the wings picked 

 up — linear markings across the wing base without any great 

 denudation of the scales generally. 



" I followed the movements of the second bird as far as 

 possible till mid-day, only losing sight of it once or twice for 

 a few seconds, and it then flew down on to the grass and seized 

 and took up into a tree an Orthopteron, which it proceeded 

 to dismember and to eat. I then shot it and examined 

 microscopically the contents of the alimentary canal, for the 

 material other than the head of the Orthopteron was pulped 

 and unrecognisable by the unaided eye. I studied first the 

 rectal contents, and to my joy at once found scales : on com- 

 paring these with some scrapings from the wing of a Catopsilia 

 I found many identical. The stomach contents of course 

 exhibited them in great abundance. An important point I 

 think is that though the bird had been seen to eat two butter- 

 flies barely two hours previously, I could recognise no portions 

 of them except with the aid of the microscope. This rapidity 

 of digestion may explain how it is that butterflies' bodies are 

 so rarely found in the stomach contents of birds. 



The poor bird, very badly skinned I am afraid, is labelled 



