92 THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIST. 
wildly to and fro. Lost pencil! Remembered second one in 
handkerchief and felt grateful to unknown professor. Sight too 
wonderful to describe, a black moon surrounded by a ring of 
unearthly white, with four great points of light, left hand top 
point considerably shorter than other three, and a scarcely per- 
ceptible difference in the length of the lower left point. There 
was no dew. There was sufficient light to make rough drawing 
and notes, but it was not the light of life, it could only be 
likened to the light of a dead world, grey, unearthly. Highteen 
past 4, and a brilliant flash as though a star ad burst into be- 
ing, and the old light of the work-a-day world came slowly 
back. 
FROM A BUSH NOTE BOOK. 
By F. M. Irpy. 
Birds are curiously gregarious. I do not mean birds of a 
kinc, but any species. You may go to some likely looking bit 
of bush or serub and search it through without finding a single 
nest, and probably seeing so few birds that you come away 
bitterly disappointed, and probably under the impression that 
you are in a district painfully destitute of bird life; but, wander- 
ing to another bit of bush, a quarter, or half a mile distant, 
you will possibly find it fairly teeming with feathered folk. It 
reminds one of the human rush for cities, 
There is a small damp spot, on the edge of the tea-tree 
swamp, just behind the house where I have never failed to find 
birds building, it is only a small pateh, possibly an acre or two 
in extent, it is dense with rugged paper-bark tea-trees, in spring 
their tops a mass of feathery white bloom, and it is closely sur- 
rounded by sweet scented flowering mahogany trees, loved by 
the Honey-eaters, Blue-faced Honey-eaters (Entomyza cyano- 
tis); Soldier birds (Manorhina garrula); Yellow-throated Friar 
birds (Philemon  citreogularis); Yellow-faced Honey-eaters 
(Ptilotis chrysops) ; and Blood-birds (Myzomela sanguinolenta) ; 
are particularly numerous, while at times there are other 
varieties. . 
In one gnarled old paper-barked tea-tree there I found a 
Willie wag-tail (Phipidura tricolor) nest, a Pee-wit’s (Grallina 
picata) nest, and also a huge bulky one belonging to a pair of 
Happy family’s (Pomatorhinus temporalis), but then every 
bushman will tell you that practically four times out of every 
