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line their nests with pigs’ bristles, as a substitute for horse-hair, which is generally used by them in 
other parts of the country. In a multitude of cases I have found the cavity of the nest lined 
with long horse-hair intermixed with dry bents, all carefully twined together. An example in the 
Canterbury Museum has the cavity lined entirely with long horse-hair, and two other specimens in 
the same collection have a lining composed exclusively of fine grass-stems, carefully bent. 
A specimen which I found suspended in a clump of creeping kohia was composed externally of 
the pale green and rust-coloured lichen so abundant on the branches of dead timber, intermixed with 
spiders’ webs, and lined inside with dry fibrous grasses, the whole being laced together with hair, the 
long straggling ends of which projected from every part of the nest ; and another, which was obtained 
from the low brushwood bordering on the sea-shore, was built of sheep s wool, spiders nests, pellets 
of cow-hair, and fine seaweed firmly bound together with long thread-like fibres, apparently the 
rootlets of some aquatic plant, and lined internally with fine grass-bents and soft feathers. Sometimes 
the nest is constructed wholly of bents and dry grass. 
I have lately had an opportunity of examining a beautiful series of the nests of this species, and 
I remarked that through all the varieties of individual form and structure they presented these two 
essential features — the large cup-like cavity with thin walls, and the admixture of long hairs in the 
lining material. In one of the nests forming this series the proximity to civilization was proclaimed 
by a lining consisting of the flaxen hair from a child’s doll ! 
Zosterops is not, strictly speaking, a suctorial bird ; but it is closely allied to the Tubi- 
lingues. The tongue has no brush, but ends in two short filaments ; and, as shown by Dr. Gadow, 
in his ‘Account of the Suctorial Apparatus of the Tenuirostres,’ is far from being the complicated 
and elaborate organ generally exhibited in the tubular tongues of the Nectarinikke and Meliphagidse. 
The genus has an extensive range, for, according to the British Museum Catalogue, its members 
are spread all over South Africa south of the Sahara, Madagascar and the Comoro Islands, the entire 
Indian Peninsula and Ceylon, Burmese countries, the whole of China (extending into Amoor Land), 
Japan, Formosa, Hainan, Malay Peninsula, all the Indo-Malayan islands, Moluccas, New Guinea and 
the adjacent Papuan group, and (with few exceptions) throughout the islands of the great Pacific 
Ocean. 
Mi*. Gould states that Zosterops ccerulescens “ is stationary in all parts of Tasmania, New South 
Wales, and South Australia, where it is not only to be met with in the forests and thickets, but 
also in nearly every garden.” 
At the Chatham Islands, where it is now very abundant, it is said to have made its first appear- 
ance shortly after the great fire in Australia known as Black Thursday. 
