I nT 
DOME steer 
THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST 71 
Philemon corniculatus, love the Bean trees. Chattering 
and fighting, they hang in strange attitudes about the 
flowers, and sometimes there will be a young Koel, Hudy- 
nanies cyanocephala, with them (for here the Kioels al- 
ways seem to lay in the Leather-heads’ nests), a great 
fat overgrown baby, quite old enough and capable of get- 
ting its own food, but too stupid and lazy to try; and 
this one sturdy infant, with its unceasing shriek for food, 
will make more din than all the Leather-heads and par- 
rots put together. 
It is curious to notice how some birds will return 
year after year to the same old nesting place. There was 
one old stump with two large white ants’ nests on it, 
and for three years I noticed that each spring the lower 
nest. was occupied by a pair of Sacred Kingfishers, Hal- 
cyon sanctus, while the upper story was taken by a pair 
of Laughing Jackasses, Dacelo gigas. One white-ants’ nest 
was pointed out to me where a pair of beautiful little 
Macleay Kingfishers, Halcyon Macleayi, had reared famil- 
ies for four years; and there was a hollow spout just a 
little higher up the tree where a pair of Dollar birds, 
Burystomus Australis, had been known to breed for the 
same number of years. Indeed, the Dollar birds are so 
fond of the same nesting hole that if anything happens 
to tha tree they had been used to occupy, they will take 
possession of the nearest one possible to where it stood. 
Some of the Willie-Wagtails, Rhipidura tricolor, ap- 
pear to be of an economical turn of mind. I have seen 
them using the same nests as many as three times in one 
season, though never in the same place. They simply pull 
the nest to pieces and remove it gradually to another situ- 
ation, sometimes so close to the old one that the casual 
observer wonders why they bothered to move at all. 
Tn an out-of-the-way corner of the Tweed, early this 
month, the Maiden’s Blush trees, Hchinocarpus australis 
(Syn. Sloanea australis), were a most lovely sight, so 
many of them and such wonderful masses of bloom. Tn 
one spot, on the side of a very steep hill, the boughs, 
looking as though they’d been through a snow storm, with 
the whiteness of their flowers, hung downwards, mixing 
with the heaped-up mats of tree-fern that rose to meet 
them. 
Sydney Harbour and the Blue Mountains may be 
soul-satisfying in their loveliness, and the vastness of Kios- 
ciusko takes one’s breath away, but you want to sit and 
