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Mr. D. Dewar,



My collection grew by leaps and bounds, and a carpenter

who was specially employed in making travelling boxes and

cages was unable to keep pace with the number of animals which

kept on arriving. I paid daily visits to three or four animal

dealers’ shops in Sydney, and secured many interesting creatures,

while every now and then a snake catcher, who was known as

“ Snaky George,” would arrive with some venomous Tiger Snake

or Black Snake coiled up in a sack, which he would hold open

with the utmost unconcern.


(To be continued].



THE PARADISE FLYCATCHER.


By D. Dewar, I.C.S.


The Editor has asked me to write for the Journal of the

Avicultural Society a short account of the Paradise Flycatcher

(Terpsiphone paradisi'). With his request I gladly comply, for

this Flycatcher is a bird of which I am exceedingly fond. As

regards beauty of form and grace of motion it can hold its own

against all comers. A cock, in the full glory of his white

plumage, as he flits like a sprite through some shady plantation,

is a sight never to be forgotten. The movements of his long

tail-feathers, as he pursues liis course amid the green foliage, are

as graceful as those of the folds of the garments of a skilled

serpentine dancer. Imagine a very-slenderly built Whydah-bird,

provided with a metallic steely blue-black crest and arrayed in

snowy white, having the tail feathers longer and more attenuated

than the Whydali, and you have some idea of the appearance of

the Paradise Flycatcher. Set this in a frame of rich leafy green

and you have him as we see him in India. Substitute for the

white a rich chestnut and you have a cock in an earlier stage of

plumage. Knock off the long median tail feathers and you have

a hen or a young cock.


According to Oates, the cock assumes his white livery

after the autumnal moult of his third year. I have never seen a

live cock in the stage of transition, but there is in the Madras

Museum a specimen in which some of the feathers are white and

the others chestnut. Terpsiphone paradisi occurs in most parts



