EEMINISCENCES FROM THE MELBOURNE ZOO. 
223 
about 2000 B.C. They deserve great respect from us in Australia, as 
well as they did from the ancient Egyptians, for we, like them, are subject 
to the ravages of the locust, or grasshopper, plague, and the ibises are 
our best protectors from those pestilent insects. Mr. Le Souef has seen 
the birds in colonies estimated to contain half a million, and as one that 
was shot was found to have a hundred grasshoppers in his crop, as well 
as a number of yabbies, it would be an interesting bit of arithmetic to 
work out how many grasshoppers would be eaten in a week by half a 
million birds if each ate one hundred every day. A farmer on the border 
told Mr. Wilkie that not long ago he was threatened with the ruin of his 
year’s work by a sudden visitation of grasshoppers. Smoking them 
out was ineffective, and then he tried burning a strip of bush and several 
other supposed checks, without any result. He was just about to 
abandon all hope, when some ibises appeared. They were the fore- 
runners of a mighty host, that even darkened the sky as they sped to 
the feast. The farmer was saved. Next day, he said, the birds were 
hunting around for the stragglers of the grasshopper plague, for they 
had eaten up the vast majority of them the day before. 
DEER AND ANTELOPES 
OPERATIONS. 
There are naturally a good many deer in the gardens. The beauti- 
ful tame creatures are always great favorites with the public, and, when 
the young fawns are to be seen, there is scarcely a spot more frequented 
than those holding the timid little things. Yet, although deer are so 
tame with ordinary human kind, they are by no means as quiet as they 
look. It is always necessary to erect double dividing fences between 
them and their neighbors, because otherwise there would soon be a fight 
to the death between them. Frequently it is compulsory to saw off 
their antlers in order to save the lives of the animals nearest them. At 
one time the red deer had as one neighbor the Barrasingha deer (the 
largest Indian deer), and on the other side a fine pair of Elands (the 
largest variety of antelope). When the red deer smashed off all the 
pickets of the two fences, and it was only too probable that he would 
get into the Elands’ enclosure and bring about a deadly combat, his 
horns were sawn off to within about an inch of the knobs from which 
