88 RECORDS OF THE AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM. 
greatest pleasures enjoyed by the late celebrated botanist Robert 
Brown, during the last thirty years of his life, was now and then 
to show me a drawing of a Parrakeet made by one of the brothers 
Bauer, from a specimen procured somewhere on the north coast 
of Australia, but of which no specimen was preserved at the time, 
and none had been sent to England, until several were brought 
home by Mr. Elsey, a year or two prior to Mr. Brown’s death. 
On comparing these with the drawing made a least forty years 
before, no doubt remained on my mind as to its having been made 
from an example of this species. This, then, is one of the novelties 
for which we are indebted to the explorations of A. C. Gregory Esq. 
and I trust it may not be the last I shall have to characterize 
through the researches of this intrepid traveller. Mr. Elsey, who, 
as is well known, accompanied the expedition to the Victoria 
River, obtained three examples- a male, a female, and a young bird 
— all of which are now in our national collection. In the notes accom- 
panying the specimens, Mr. Elsey states that they were procured on 
the 14th of September 1856, in Lat. 18° S. and Long. 141° 33' E., 
and that their crops contained some monocotyledonous seeds.” 
Since the above passage was written by Gould, so far as I am 
aware, no additional information has been recorded of Psephotus 
chrysopterygius , the rarest of all our Australian Parrakeets, and 
the three specimens in the British Museum obtained by Mr. Elsey 
in 1856 were the only ones known. It was therefore with extreme 
pleasure that when passing one of the bird dealer’s shops near 
Circular Quay, in November 1897, my attention was arrested by 
a living specimen of the Golden-shouldered Parrakeet, the first I 
had seen, and previously known to me only by Gould’s description 
and figure. On making inquiries I found that it had been caught 
by a bird-catcher in his nets about three months before in the 
neighbourhood of Port Darwin, in the Northern Territory, and 
was the only specimen that he had ever seen. Subsequently it 
was acquired by the Trustees, and has since enlivened my room 
with its cheerful notes. It bears confinement well and is exceed- 
ingly tame, except to strangers, feeding entirely on millet seed 
and leaving untouched the canary seed with which it is mixed. 
Like other members of this genus — which I have seen wade into 
water to quench their thirst — it partakes freely of water. One 
note of this species repeated several times at intervals of a second 
apart is exceedingly sharp and shrill, and resembles the metallic 
sound produced by quickly turning an unoiled key in a new and 
close fitting lock. The remainder of its notes which are continued 
for some time, is like the warbling of the Grass Parrakeet, 
Melopsiitacus undulatus, only much louder. This specimen 
measures ten inches, and from the brilliancy of its plumage is 
evidently an adult male. Gould’s central figure of the male of 
this species in his “ Supplement to the Birds of Australia,”* is too 
* Gould — Suppl. Bds. Austr., pi. 64 (1869). 
