€2 THE VICTORIAN NATURALIST. 



season after season, instead of building an entirely new one as 

 all the rest do after rearing a single clutch. 



The Australian members of the family muscicapidae or 

 flycatcher — which, under the recent classification of the 

 British Museum, includes our robins — build nests which are 

 both beautiful and unique. Thus, one of the most common 

 species, the white-shafted ( Rhipidura alhiscapaj builds a nest 

 resembling a wineglass in shape, and composed of the soft 

 inner bark of the stringy-bark or other tree, carefully inter- 

 woven, and coated externally with cobwebs, etc., and lined with 

 hair and dried grass. Another species, the black fantail 

 (Rhipidura tricolor), builds an equally beautiful nest, slightly 

 larger than the last, and composed of somewhat coarser 

 materials. A peculiarity of this nest is that it is very often 

 placed in the smaller branches of some fallen bough, in 

 preference to the dead bough still attached to a living tree, 

 resorted to by its ally, the brown flycatcher ( Microeca fascinans ). 

 Another point worthy of notice is that the hair with which it is 

 lined is often plucked from the back of some cow or horse 

 whilst the bird flutters lightly above it. With reference to the 

 nest of the brown flycatcher, I might mention that it is a most 

 difficult one to find, and, were it not that the birds themselves 

 are, like a great many of the flycatchers, excessively tame, its 

 eggs would be rarities amongst collectors, instead of being 

 tolerably common as they are, for this bird will frequently in 

 jour presence go to its nest and proceed with the task of 

 building or sitting in such a confiding manner that you scarcely 

 have the heart to rob it of its eggs. 



The robins build nests of stouter structure and materials, and 

 prefer a living fork for their situation. That of the scarlet- 

 breasted {Petroica multicolor^ may be taken as a type. Strips of 

 bark woven together form the groundwork, and this is coated 

 with cobwebs, lichens, and other soft substances. When this 

 nest is placed, as it frequently is, on a thick fork, some twenty 

 or thirty feet from the ground, it requires a practised eye to 

 distinguish it from the numerous knobs and excrescences which 

 abound on most of the eucalypti. 



The members of that large family of birds the honeyeaters — 

 which are as strictly peculiar to Australasia as are the eucalypti 

 themselves — all build cup-shaped nests, although the situations 

 and materials show considerable variety. Thus, we have 

 amongst the larger species the nest of twigs of that noisy 

 inhabitant of our forests, the minah ( Myzantha garrula), placed 

 in the smaller branches of the sheoak or other small tree ; or 

 the similar nest of the wattle bird ( Anthocara carunculataj. 

 Then amongst the smaller species, those of the white-plumed 

 (Ptilotis penicillata), the yellow-faced ( Ptilotis chrysopsj, or the 

 spine-billed ( Acanthorhynchus tenuirosirisj, all of which are 



