180 
PLUMAGE OF THF BIRDS. 
for the ensuing wet season, by making and mending 
the tortuous clay-roofed tunnels which led to their 
various colonies. Our interesting little friends the 
M^eaver-birds were also employed, in constructing their 
curious pensile nests, and some had advanced so far as 
to have completed and even tenanted them with 
unfledged broods, over which they watched with noisy 
twitterings. The male birds had now exchanged 
their rich yellow and rufous plumage for a dingy black, 
and looked quite out of character by the side of the 
richly adorned and solicitous females. These little 
artisans seem to have sympathy with the human 
species, — much like our own impudent sparrows, — for 
they always select such cocoa-nut or palm-trees, to 
suspend their woven habitations, as are surrounded by 
the busy haunts of man, where they form large 
settlements, as many as two hundred of these oddly 
shaped structures sometimes hanging from a single 
tree. The crimson nutcracker, too, had undergone a 
change for the worse, having lost his rich glossy crim- 
son and brown, which was replaced by a sooty black, 
while the little grey-headed pyrgita, in its modest and 
never attractive plumage, had remained unaltered, like 
many other unpretending things in this life. 
Some of the native women were engaged in the 
plantations, the dry season not being so profitable for 
the more favourite occupation of washing for gold. As 
to the men, they were as listless and lazy as ever, save 
the fishing portion, who being generally poorer than 
