162 PHE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
ee ee 
Finding the rats too active the mongoose has turned its 
attention to the introduced Californian quail, pheasants, and 
domestic poultry. 
There are many of the typical sea birds around the coast, 
but of all the small native birds very few are left, chiefly 
because the naturalists and collectors hunted them for speci- 
mens. Among the most interesting is MJedlithriptes 
pacifica, a little bird that had the misfortune to have a yel- 
iow feather under each wing, for the yellow-feathered were 
used by the Hawaiian kings in making their royal war- 
cloaks. The great cloak of Kamehameha I. buried with the 
last of the kings, was over eleven feet long and four feet 
wide, so you can imagine how many birds died to make 
such a cloak. 
The two common birds one sees about the plantations are 
the rice or weaver birds (Mania risovia) introduced from 
the Malay Peninsula about 1878, and now a pest in the 
Chinese rice fields, and the well-known Indian minah, which 
is more a pest than useful in the gardens. 
Among some of the most noticeable insects are the follow- 
ing :—A large carpenter bee (XyZacopa acneipennis), intro- 
duced from North America; it finds the wooden verandah 
posts admirable places in which to hore its burrows when 
nesting, and often damages them to such an extent that they 
want renewing. Fuller’s rose beetle (Avamzgus fullerz) 
from the States, and the Japanese leaf beetle (Adoredus 
umbrosus) are great pests on foliage, and do much harm to 
roses. The Bishop Museum, endowed by Mr. Bishop in 
memory of his wife, Princess Berenice Pauahi, has a very 
fine collection of the zoology of the Islands; and one of the 
finest works on Island faunas, the ‘‘Ffauna Hawaiiensis,”’ 
has been published with the aid of the trustees of this 
Museum. 
In California my headquarters were at Alameda, a suburb 
of San Francisco, where my old friend, Prof. A. Koebele, 
resides, and thus I had the opportunity of seeing some of 
the natural history close to the town. Going along in the 
train I noticed the great swarms of the white cabbage butter- 
flies (Pieris brassica) that infested the market gardens. 
Koebele was catching gophers in his garden one afternoon: 
the gopher is a burrowing rat-like animal that does a lot of 
damage in cultivated lands by eating off the roots of plants; 
he was doctoring carrots with poison and burying them 
where he located the burrows. The farmers in the west use 
potatoes poisoned and dropped into the burrows of gophers 
and ground squirrels. There was a very pretty little ground 
squirrel common in the sandbanks along the roads around 
