Letters , Announcements , fyc. 127 
afresh with grass and hair, and, laying four roundish white eggs, 
begin to breed. 
This species of Pardalote I have also frequently found breed¬ 
ing in the hollow boughs of the Eucalypti. P. punctatus and 
P. melanocephalus are the only species I know of that pick out 
for themselves holes in the ground; having there hollowed a 
long narrow chamber large enough, they line it with fine shreds 
of stringy-bark and the like. The eggs of P. melanocephalus 
are larger than those of any of the others; but all are white, and 
usually ovate. 
In the last part of my “ Notes on Birds breeding in the 
neighbourhood of Sydney” (Ibis, 1865, p. 299), the paragraphs 
headed Chelidon arborea should refer to C. ariel ; and in the foot¬ 
note on page 298, the word “ orange ” in line 5 from the bottom 
should be “ yellow.” 
I am, &c,, 
Edward P. Ramsay. 
28 Wellington Street, Woolwich, 
November 18th, 1865. 
Sir, —In the last number of c The Ibis 5 you inquire if any of 
your readers have ever seen a Skua in the act of swimming. I 
beg leave, in reply, to inform you that I have seen one species, 
Stercorarius parasiticus, several times so doing, and have a spe¬ 
cimen now by me which was shot while swimming in the Thames, 
about two miles below Woolwich, in October 1864. 
I am, &c., 
H. Whitely. 
/ 
2 -^ o 
9 December, 1865. 
Sir, —A short time since, on looking over some skins which 
were on sale at Mr. Stevens’s in Bloomsbury Street, I observed 
an immature specimen of Hypotriorchis concolor , which he in¬ 
formed me had been brought from the Zambesi River by Dr. 
Kirk. As this species is not included in either of the lists of 
the birds of that region published in f The Ibis 9 for 1864, and 
as also I have never before seen it from any locality south of the 
Equator, I think it well to record the fact. 
/H<j 
