6 
NATURE NOTES. 
the hollow trunk of an apple tree in the orchard, which almost 
every year is used as a nursery by birds of some sort or 
other. Finding the hole too large, they plastered it up with 
cla}^ leaving an entrance hole of rather more than an inch and 
a-half in diameter. Their work was very firm and solid, and 
finished with the most workmanlike neatness and exactness. 
Even the little brown wren, skilful as she is in such matters, 
could hardly have formed a more perfectly circular entrance. 
These notes have run to far greater length than was at first 
intended, and I will only express the hope that feeding the birds 
through the winter may become more and more general, and 
that there may be a corresponding diminution in the hateful 
and indiscriminate slaughter of our feathered friends. 
Wickham Market. G. T. Rope. 
AUGUST IN NEW ZEALAND. 
LTHOUGH most of the imported weeds and grasses 
never cease growing, and many of them flower through- 
out our short winter of eight or ten weeks, still it is 
during this month that first a more general awakening 
may be noticed. In the garden, where during winter on the bare 
unbudded boughs the kingfishers perched, watching in the rain 
for homeless, wandering worms, now peach and apricot blossom 
in shades of pink. In the warm days the English bees are out 
in hundreds, though the solitary native bee does not emerge from 
its cell for two months. Several shrubs in the bush provide a 
vast amount of pollen, and hone}'^ may be procured from the 
small fragrant flowers of the wax-white heath that grows on 
barren hill-sides and tops. In warm days its low-growing blos- 
soms give forth a delicate scent like laurel leaves crushed. 
Towards the end of the month the clematis may be noticed, 
festooning in white wreaths the tops of the low-growing trees. 
It always flowers in a conspicuous fashion, as if proud of its 
virgin beauty. The leaves of the “ fern flower ” are also above 
ground on the warmer slopes. Our earliest sundew has acquired 
this name because it appears in greatest quantity after fires have 
destroyed the heavy fern growth that covers thousands of acres 
in the north. Above the clammy insect-trapping leaves a few pink 
open cup-blossoms hang. They expand in the sun, and close 
rather early in the afternoons. English daisies are plentiful, and 
short-stalked golden dandelions lie close on the nibbled grass. 
On the fuchsia branches the wax-eyes may be noticed sucking 
honey from the flowers in all attitudes, circling the boughs or 
hanging head down, like athletes on a bar. Indeed, a fuchsia 
tree at this season exhibits a considerable amount of colour. It 
is everywhere deciduous, and in autumn upon the mountains its 
