BIRDS. 67 
according to their respective species, the brightest cobalt blue or scarlet commingled 
with black predominate. A near and interesting relative of the foregoing species, 
but of even less dimensions, is the little Australian Emu Wren, Stipiturus malichurus, 
whose more homely tints of brown and lilac-grey are compensated for by the unique 
character of the elongate tail feathers. The pinne of these feathers are individually 
separated and hair-like, as obtains normally in those of the Emu and other Struthionide. 
As a pendent to these brief bird notices, reference may be made to the 
several photographs reproduced in Plate XI. These illustrations, which possess some- 
what of the comic element, represent a pair of young pelicans, Pelicanus conspicillatus, 
taken from the neighbourhood of the Lacepede Islands, which were brought 
on board the ss. “Albany,” during the writer’s recent passage by that vessel up 
the Western Australian coast. In their infantile, featherless condition, they pre- 
sented a remarkable likeness to plucked geese, and were regarded with such dismay 
by a young fox-terrier puppy experimentally introduced to them, that, as portrayed in 
Figs. 2 and 3 of our snapshot pictures, he, after one moment of open-mouthed agony 
and distress, incontinently turned tail and fled. The persevering toilet performances 
of these “Innocents abroad,” with scarcely a feather on which to lavish their exuberant 
energies, as portrayed in Fig. 4 of the same Plate, proved an unending source of 
mirth to the numerous company on board the good ship “ Albany.” 
On one other of the writer's voyages up the Western Australian coast an 
interesting bird passenger was embarked in the shape of a young Osprey or Sea- 
Eagle, Pandion leucocephalus. This bird, which had been taken and kept in captivity 
for a brief season at Shark’s Bay, was so tame that it allowed itself to be lifted with 
the hands and posed by the writer for its portrait overleaf. This species of Eagle is 
met with throughout the tropical and sub-tropical Australian Coast-line. At Thursday 
Island, Torres Straits, a pair habitually build a huge nest of interlacing sticks on one 
of the cruciform wooden beacons that define the boundary of the navigable channel. On 
Adolphus Island, Cambridge Gulf, in the extreme north west, there is another such nest 
that is of almost classic interest. It is built in a large Baobab or Bottle-tree, Adansonia 
rupestris, and would seem to be identical with one first noticed by Captain Phillip King 
in his “Survey of the Coasts of Australia” (1826), and has apparently been tenanted by 
successive generations down to the present time. A nest, occupying the position 
indicated by Captain King, was, at all events, found on Adolphus Island by the 
officers of H.M.S. “Myrmidon” under command of Captain the Hon. Foley Vereker, 
when making a detailed survey of Cambridge Gulf in the year 1888. The writer 
