264 Jackson, In the Barron River Valley, N.Q. [isfki"ie. 



places. Finally they flitted off, and we seized the opportunity 

 to climb up and hunt for the expected nest. I entrusted the 

 job to my best climber, who selected a long hanging water-vine 

 ( Vitts), and simply walked up it as a fly would on a hanging 

 string. He was one of the very best among the many marvel- 

 lous aboriginal climbers I have known. He spent a long time 

 up in his leafy eyrie, and finally located what he took to be the 

 nest in a mass of very dense foliage. All the while we were in 

 a state of restless apprehension lest the birds would return and 

 discover the intruder, and in fact he had only just dropped the 

 last few feet of his downward journey when they did come back, 

 and flew straight into the clump which held the supposed nest. 

 Very eagerly we put our climber through a cross-examination. 

 He described the assumed nest as placed on a tangled mass of 

 vines and as composed of freshly broken, thin, dry twigs, loosely 

 put together, and evidently only recently commenced. Accord- 

 ing to his description, at this early stage it much resembled the 

 nest of the Allied Fruit-Pigeon, which in his own dialect is 

 styled " Bog-um-moo." In my mind there lingered no doubt 

 that we had at last found the long-hoped-for nest of the Tooth- 

 billed Bower-Bird, and my dark retainer grinned cavernously, 

 and, with a view to adding extra assurance, repeated the native 

 name of the bird, " Cherra-chelbo," over and over again, but I 

 could see, with some uneasiness, that my friend Frizelle was not 

 satisfied. In fact, he voiced his suspicion by saying that he was 

 puzzled over it, and that he had expected the nest to more 

 closely resemble that of the Spotted Cat-Bird, 



By-and-by the birds returned and flew into the mass of 

 greenery which contained the nest, but, try as I would at every 

 view-point and every angle, and using the strongest of field- 

 glasses, I could not pierce the baffling screen of leaves and 

 ascertain exactly where they were and what doing. As a last 

 resort I got my aborigine to get twigs and sticks of the same 

 size as those composing the nest, and to reconstruct as it were a 

 model of his find, and from this meagre information I had to 

 calculate the stage at which the building of the nest had arrived, 

 coming finally to the conclusion that it would be a few weeks 

 before eggs were laid. The result lifted a worrying anxiety as 

 to ultimate possible failure from my mind. I was to a great 

 extent satisfied, and, hoping that the birds would not desert their 

 nest, I returned to camp and packed a kit-bag with a few 

 necessaries for my contemplated trip to the Evelyn scrubs, 

 lying about 40 miles south-west from the camp and on the 

 Herberton Range, leaving Mr. Frizelle in charge of our "base." 



In company of Mr. W. E. Bevan, one of the local residents, I 

 reached the Evelyn scrub on the morning of the 17th November. 

 Here I met Mr. J. Sharp, whose brother, Mr. George Sharp, was 

 in the locality, also engaged in oological work, and in securing 



