BIRDS. 67 



according to their respective species, the brightest cobalt blue or scarlet commingled 

 with black predominate. A near and interesting relative of the foregoing species, 

 but of even less dimensions, is the little Australian Emu Wren, Stipiturus malichums, 

 whose more homely tints of brown and lilac-grey are compensated for by the unique 

 character of the elongate tail feathers. The pinnae of these feathers are individually 

 separated and hair-like, as obtains normally in those of the Emu and other Struthionidse. 



As a pendent to these brief bird notices, reference may be made to the 

 several photographs reproduced in Plate XI. These illustrations, which possess some- 

 what of the comic element, represent a pair of young pelicans, Pelicanus conspicillatus, 

 taken from the neighbourhood of the Lacepede Islands, which were brought 

 on board the ss. " Albany," during the writer's recent passage by that vessel up 

 the Western Australian coast. In their infantile, featherless condition, they pre- 

 sented a remarkable likeness to plucked geese, and were regarded with such dismay 

 by a young fox-terrier puppy experimentally introduced to them, that, as portrayed in 

 Figs. 2 and 3 of our snapshot pictures, he, after one moment of open-mouthed agony 

 and distress, incontinently turned tail and fled. The persevering toilet performances 

 of these " Innocents abroad," with scarcely a feather on which to lavish their exuberant 

 energies, as portrayed in Fig. 4 of the same Plate, proved an unending source of 

 mirth to the numerous company on board the good ship " Albany." 



On one other of the writer's voyages up the Western Australian coast an 

 interesting bird passenger was embarked in the shape of a young Osprey or Sea- 

 Eagle, Pandion leucocephalus. This bird, which had been taken and kept in captivity 

 for a brief season at Shark's Bay, was so tame that it allowed itself to be lifted with 

 the hands and posed by the writer for its portrait overleaf. This species of Eagle is 

 met with throughout the tropical and sub-tropical Australian Coast-line. At Thursday 

 Island, Torres Straits, a pair habitually build a huge nest of interlacing sticks on one 

 of the cruciform wooden beacons that define the boundary of the navigable channel. On 

 Adolphus Island, Cambridge Gulf, in the extreme north west, there is another such nest 

 that is of almost classic interest. It is built in a large Baobab or Bottle-tree, Adansmia 

 rupestris, and would seem to be identical with one first noticed by Captain Phillip King 

 in his " Survey of the Coasts of Australia " (1826), and has apparently been tenanted by 

 successive generations down to the present time. A nest, occupying the position 

 indicated by Captain King, was, at all events, found on Adolphus Island by the 

 officers of H.M.S. " Myrmidon " under command of Captain the Hon. Foley Vereker, 

 when making a detailed survey of Cambridge Gulf in the year 1888. The writer 



