The Wilderness 



then darting suddenly down to catch an insect on the wing, and up 

 again to their swinging perch. Pity 'tis their voice has no beauty, but 

 is just a querulous squawking note. 



Handsome creatures, too, are the dollar-birds which visit the 

 wilderness every year and drift amongst the tall tree-tops, displaying 

 the silvery dollars on their wings against a blue-and-brown background. 

 But their voices ! a small boy compared them to a lot of mad frogs, 

 and the description is not inapt. Fortunately for our ears these 

 harsh-voiced birds .are short-stayed visitors, but many of the birds 

 that linger in the wilderness are true singers. 



As I write the air is filled with the glorious song of the butcher- 

 birds, which stay with us all through the late summer and autumn and 

 sometimes come in the spring. I have heard all the old-world song- 

 birds the nightingale and the lark, the blackbird and the thrush 

 heard and loved them all. But for sheer beauty and volume I know 

 no bird whose voice compares with the butcher-bird's, and I think 

 it is a sin that he should be so named. 



It is not his habit of making an occasional meal from a small 

 bird that has given the butcher-bird his name, for many birds have the 

 same habit. It is his peculiar custom of storing his food that has gained 

 him the reputation of keeping a " butcher's shop." Most birds kill 

 an insect as they need it and either eat it or carry it off to their nestlings. 

 The butcher-bird thriftily makes a small collection of insects and lays 

 them in a row. I have seen him lay a huge brown grasshopper and a 

 slim praying mantis side by side on my garden rail, and then fly off 

 and hang another grasshopper in a slender fork of a wattle. 



Gould, in his famous work, pictures the butcher-bird with a blue 



12 



