28 
. n r The ■ H ^ mu 
A. H. CHISHOLM, Seeking Rare Parrots. L i»t .miy 
species to Queensland at all.) Nevertheless it w there, still dis¬ 
tributed sparingly in suitable areas up as far as (probably) cen¬ 
tral Queensland. 
Mr. lllidge and Mr. Rrenan had told me of their meetings 
with the bird in the vicinity of Brisbane long ago, but settlement, 
apparently, had driven it right out of south-eastern Queens¬ 
land. Accordingly, the knowledge that a Parrot answering to 
the description of Pesopprus was to be observed some 200 miles 
north of Brisbane was a strong invitation to travel. \\ e did not 
visit the spots specified on the mainland, but many spnght y 
hours went by in the haunts of the species on hraser Island. 
“We” included Messrs. E, H. F. Swain, Queensland Director 
of Forests, Walter Petrie, forester, and F. C. Epps, toiestei , 
and Fraser Island may be identified as the gieat mass ot 
afforested sand, some eighty miles in length and 700,000 acres 
in extent, lying a few miles off the coast of central Queensland. 
Following a Bird Day ramble (October 20) with the children 
of half a dozen schools combined in the Goomeri district, I joined 
the foresters at Maryborough, and together we went, on a 
forestry boat, the twenty-five miles or so down the Mary River 
and across Hervey Bay to Fraser Island. Here it will not be 
out of place to interpolate that more keenly intelligent foresters 
than Messrs. Swain, Petrie and Epps would be difficult to find. 
Mr. Petrie—as befits a son of Tom Petrie, the famous confidant 
of the Queensland aborigines — is also a sound bird-observer and 
a really remarkable imitator of bird-notes. It follows, then, that 
the three joined in the search for Pezoporus, a job negotiated 
on horseback. Further, it has to be recorded that the Director 
of Forests registered the first success. 
We were riding, spread out, through one of the extensive 
banksia-skirted dry swamps that abound on the island, when 
there came a call that two Parrot-like birds had risen and dropped 
again. Following, we soon flushed two birds, which rose with 
an eddying, zigzag, Swallow-like flight, alternately gliding and 
beating the wings rapidly, travelled some fifty yards, and then 
dived into the grass. There was a display of mottled green and 
yellow as they flew. That flight: what an extraordinary motion 
for a Parrot! Gould had remarked on the great speed of the 
bird on the wing, and the fact that it “frequently makes several 
zdgzag turns in the short distance of a hundred yards,” but — 
just as you do not know coral until you cut your foot on a reef! 
— a bald description hardly prepares the observer for what this 
strange Parrot has to offer when in full flight. 
On two other days we flushed Parrots in the same locality, 
but the closest hunting failed to reveal a nest. One find looked 
promising, but it was the nest of Phaps elegans, the Brush 
Bronzewing-Pigeon, holding two eggs, nicely tucked away under 
a tuft of grass. The Parrots may have been breeding, but the 
