18 MATESHIP WITH BIRDS 



close audience at its "wheezing" performance, and 

 I saw how the strange notes worked up from the 

 body of the bird until, at their height, the small bill 

 was wide open, as with a brooding bird gasping in 

 the heat of the Summer sun. It is not true, as 

 several books assert, that the grinding notes which 

 have made the Restless Flycatcher famous are only 

 uttered when the bird is hovering a few feet above 

 the ground. I hear them just as often when their 

 author is perched on stump or fence-post. Essen- 

 tially, however, this beautiful Flycatcher has the 

 sea-birds' manner of hunting ; it is able to look down 

 in flight without turning the head to one side. 



Soon, now, the beauteous Robins will be unob- 

 trusively moving off to the uplands for the breeding- 

 season; the Flycatchers, too, will be seeking out 

 their old nesting-trees, and the more open areas will 

 be left to the busy Magpies, the shapely Bush-Chats, 

 and the merry Tit- Warblers. What more sparkling 

 bird-melody than the voices of the Yellow-tailed Tit- 

 Warblers giving greeting to our Lady of the Spring ! 

 You hear them now in almost every timbered field 

 and along the skirts of any road or highway bounded 

 with hedge-accommodation happy bursts of melody 

 akin to the softly- joyous laughter of young girls. 



It is as yet too early for the migratory and 

 travelled birds generally to reappear. If the Winter 

 be unusually mild, it is possible that an enterprising 

 Lark or Warbler will be heard some weeks in ad- 

 vance of the main body of those birds ; but the only 

 migrants regularly presented by August to the 

 maiden Spring in Central Victoria are the Cuckoos. 

 So soon as the impalpable heralds of the coming 



