Western Australian Birds. 
61 
1921.] 
near the Lyndon River ; a female bird was sitting on 
the eo-or J concluded that the other young birds had been 
safely hatched out, and gone away with another female. 
The nest was about a foot from the ground, made of fine 
grasses and partly domed, and looked as if it had seen a 
lot of wear. 
Leggeornis lamberti occidentalis. 
Western Blue-breasted Wrens were not plentiful about 
Carnarvon in 1911 and 1913, but very numerous from there 
to the North-West Cape, from early June to September in 
1916. A party of fledged young, with the parent birds, 
were seen feeding upon insects in heaps of dry seaweed on 
the beach at Carnarvon on 25 September. These birds are 
constantly seen feeding in dense mangroves, where insect 
life is abundant. I shot a full-plumaged male in mangroves 
one day, and saw it fall, evidently dead, a few yards 
from me. When I reached the place, the bird had dis¬ 
appeared. The same thing happened again, and I began 
to look into some of the numerous holes of the crabs that 
were plentiful under the mangroves, thinking the Wren 
might have fallen into one of them, and saw a crab backing- 
down its burrow and dragging the bird after it. I at once 
thrust my hand in, but it was too large for the cavity, and 
though I eventually forced the full length of my hand 
and arm down, the crab got away with its booty. On 
another occasion I shot a Zosterops balstoni in mangroves, 
and keeping my eye fixed on it as it lay dead, I saw it 
suddenly disappear by being seized by a crab from below. 
As previously stated in this paper, I once saw a Whistling 
Eagle pick up a Stilt before me, as it floated dead on a pool 
of water ; and another time a Tree-Creeper ( Climacteris) 
that fell into some scrub was snapped up by a lurking 
Monitor (large lizard), which disputed (unsuccessfully) 
my right to the bird ; and 1 have seen dead ducks pulled 
below the surface of the water in lakes by freshwater 
turtles, before the birds could be retrieved—but this “ crab- 
snatching” was quite a new thing. 
