LESSER RIFLE-BIRD. 
remaining in possession. A further interesting fact in this connection is the 
‘playground’ used by each male bird. In early morning the bird resorts 
to his playground and there sports himself, now spreading his wings, and rubbing 
them against the surface of the playground, and then whirling round with 
wings expanded. This he sometimes keeps up for as long as half an hour. 
No trouble is taken in preparing the ground, as is the case of the Bower-Birds 
with their wonderful bowers. The bird simply selects the broken limb of a 
dead gum on the border of the scrub, a broken palm, or perhaps a dead stump ; 
but, having chosen this, here he returns at dawn day after day, especially in 
the breeding-season. 
Campbell, in his Nests and Eggs, gives a long account of the slaughter of 
these birds, seventeen specimens at one trip, and ten on another. 
Jackson has vTitten: “ Emerging for a short space into clearer ground, 
I was rew^arded by the sight of a splendid specimen of the Victoria Rifle-Bird 
{PtilorUs victorioe), which was perched on an uporight stick about four feet from 
the ground. He was a handsome creature, a regular scrub aristocrat, and 
I spent something like an hour, motionless, watching him. Sooth to say, he 
was almost as still as I, but not quite as silent, for every now and then he would 
open his bill widely and utter a long, harsh note, which I can only describe as 
a screeching ‘ Ya-a-s ’; this performance was varied by a constant combing 
of his glossy plumage, and often, when rendering its cry, a quick movement 
of the wings, which were opened and arched fonvard, then slowly folded into 
position again. He had no looking-glass before him, yet I thinlr he was fully 
conscious of his handsome personality. I was just congratulating myself 
over the conviction that the sitting female could not be far away, when he 
took flight suddenly in a flash of gleaming colour, and with that peculiar soft, 
silk-rustling noise characteristic of the flight of his kind. He returned almost 
directly to his sentinel perch, thus still further impressing me with the idea of 
a nest close at hand. . . . Later, I reckoned that the bird I had watched 
was simply one of a newly-mated pair intent on house-building.” . . , 
“When I came to the spot at which I had previously located a pair of 
Rifle-Birds, I heard their note again. The female Rifle-Bird is a regular 
strategist; she fools and beguiles the unwary enthusiast into following her 
about a quarter of a mile, till she has him exasperatingly enmeshed in a 
tangle of la^vyer vines, and then with a turn of her tail she wheels and darts 
back in a direct line, leaving her victim.” 
Gould wrote : “ This Rifle-Bird is smaller in all its admeasurements than 
the Ptilorhis paradiseus, and may be distinguished by the purple of the breast 
presenting the appearance of a broad pectoral band, bounded above by the 
scale-like feathers of the throat, and below by the abdominal band of deep 
375 
