348 BIRDS OF THE DISTRICT OF GEELONG 
shrubs, especially if surrounded by hedges of kangaroo- 
acacia {A. armata)^ for in these it prefers to make its 
nest. 
It is insectivorous and nectar-loving. At Batesford 
one can watch these birds feeding at the honey- 
coloured flowers of the Banksia (wild honeysuckle), 
and ever and anon darting out into the air to capture 
some flying insect. 
August is the chief breeding-month. The nest is 
strongly but roughly built of dead grass, bents, and 
rootlets, lined invariably with seed-down or smaller 
dead flowers of one sort or another ; it is placed 
firmly in a thickish fork in an acacia hedge, prickly 
mimosa bush, or small shrubby ti-tree. I have seen 
a nest in a honeysuckle tree, and another, at Torquay, 
in a passion-flower vine trained on wire at the end of 
a veranda. 
In 191 1 I found a nest early in August in a clunip 
of ti-tree at Jaar-nu-ruc Creek, Torquay (the Deep 
Gully). By the end of August this was deserted and 
a new nest built not 2 yards away, in another bush. 
In this new nest there were on September 17th 
two fresh eggs. On October ist I found that one 
was deserted and the other broken, the nest clearly 
having been deserted, while 10 yards away there 
was another nest containing two eggs which appeared 
to be nearly incubated. 
The eggs number two usually; in some hundreds 
of nests which I have examined I have only seen 
one clutch of three. They are of a buffy ground- 
