142 
Editorial. 
" as they need. Each pair then cliooses tlie nest that pleases them 
'"best, and all settle down to their household duties." 
" These strangle habits of coui'se, have arrested attention, 
" and theories have been put forth to account for them. Mr. 
" Hall, in " Useful Birds of Southern Australia," suggests that this 
" prodigality in nest-making provides protection from prying* aiii- 
" mals. It is sug'gested that an enemy, after having searched several 
■' ,'nests without finding anything worth taking, would abandon the 
" search before it reached an occupied nest. The structure is oval 
" in shape. It is composed of short twigs strongly interlaced, and 
" has a side entrance. On the whole it resembles the nest of the 
" common House Sparrow. The space inside is comparatively small 
" and is deeply lined with soft grasses and feathers. Usually the 
"eg'grs are buried deep beneath a mass of loose feathers. The 
" egg's number from four to five. They have a distinctive mark- 
" in^g. The ground colour is pale brown, and over that ther© 
"are blackish streaks rcsembliUig cobweb. This skin or web is 
" not ingrained, but is merely on the surface, and may be re- 
" moved with water." The egg's lemgth is .'J.lin. and its breadth 
. 7i^." 
SuNBiEDs: By the kindness of Mrs. I\. Leslie Miller a 
female Amethyst -rumped Sunbird has come into my possession, 
and I have had the opportunity of studying it, first in a roomy 
flight and since in a large cage. The Sunbirds have often 
been described as Spider-hunters (the meaning of their 
generic name), by naturalists and others who liave 
been privileged to study tliem in their native haunts. 
How appropriate this name is I can now fully understand— 
the above specimen spent every moment of the " live-long " 
day searching every nook and cranny of the flight for spiders, 
etc., being more often wrong side up, than in tiie noi'mal posi- 
tion. Later when she was in a cage, 1 took her several 
spiders as large as marrow peas with legs in proportion— it 
was a revelation to see how these were {jounced upon and 
gulped down, if a leg or two was dropped in the process 
these were at once picked up and swallowed. On another occa- 
sion in my green -house was a cluster of young garden spiders 
{Epeiru diadema), pin-head size. I took a handful (quite 
fifty) and put them through the top of her cage, the majority 
of them iiung from a thread from top of cage, but a few 
dropped on to the cage bottom, and the little Sprite was in- 
telligent enough to understand that these stood a chance of hid- 
ing under the blotting-paper covering cage tray, and she 
