34 THE NATURALIST IN AUSTRALIA. 
highly advanced esthetic tastes, and erect their so-called bowers as combined playing 
halls and veritable museums of arts and natural history wherein they collect together 
every transportable object that takes their fancy. The location of these bowers is on 
the ground, usually in the dense scrub or within the sheltering shade of an 
appropriate bush. The basis of the bower consists of a rough platform of sticks. 
Upon this is raised on either side a series of vertically disposed twigs, which, 
meeting at their apices, form a sort of arched corridor that may be two or three 
feet, in length. The furniture and decorations of the building have now to be added. 
To accomplish this object the whole of the ground inside and around the bower is 
bestrewn with the variety collection previously referred to. Shells, bones (often 
including small skulls), pieces of glass, pottery, and fragments of human wearing apparel, 
are indiscriminately pressed into service, and mixed in ever varying proportions. 
Gaudy parrots’ feathers, pieces of coloured cloth, or other brightly tinted substances 
are regarded with especial favour, and when obtained are usually inserted among the 
interstices of the interlacing branches of the bower’s superstructure. The bower, when 
completed, is regularly resorted to by its architects as a recreation ground, more 
especially in the early mornings, when, if cautiously approached, they may be seen 
chasing one another in wanton play, to and fro, through the arched corridor and 
around the decorated grounds. The same bower is maintained in a state of repair 
' and frequented by the same pair of birds for several successive seasons, while such 
continual additions are made to the “museum” collections that they not unfrequently 
accumulate to the extent of several barrow loads. Among the many known species of 
Australian Bower Birds, the Satin Bower Bird, Ptilonorhynchus holosericeus, and the 
Spotted Bower Bird, Chlamydera maculata are the most familiar. Each of these birds 
is about the size of an English thrush. In the first-named species the male is a 
rich satiny-black with a purple gloss, and the female bird a deep olive green. The 
Spotted Bower Bird, as its name implies, is distinguished by its mottled plumage, which 
is a mixture of soft greys and browns. These quiet tints are, however, diversified 
by the presence, on the back of the head, of two small patches of longer, silky 
feathers of brilliant rose-pink, which are particularly conspicuous in the male bird. 
The Birds of Paradise, Paradisidee, which are usually allocated, in systematic works, 
to a position adjacent to the Bower Birds, while most abundantly represented in New 
Guinea, and the adjacent islands of the Malay Archipelago, possess one Australian 
species that is commonly associated with this group in the popular mind, though 
strictly belonging to the Hoopoes, Upupide. This is the so-called Rifle Bird of 
