THE AUSTRALIAN NATURALIS‘. 93 
six, you will find the nests of the Willie wag-tail and the pee- 
wit in the same or adjoining trees. In another tea-tree, only a 
few yards further on, a Yellow-throated Friar bird, a Black- 
throated Butcher bird (Cracticus nigrogularis) and a Pee-wit, 
all had their homes, it seemed unusual to see the others build- 
ing so near the Butcher bird and I wondered which had chosen 
the site first. 
: It is common to find several nests of the Happy family 
built in the one tree, but these seldom have any eges in them, 
unless, indeed, a Blue-faced honey-eater has taken possession ; 
whole companies of these energetic little birds seem to delight 
in building nest. after nest, with what object it is hard to deter- 
mine; it is different if you see a solitary pair gathering material 
and building, and you may be sure of finding eggs in the 
finished nest. Down a little hillside on the Tweed I recently 
saw the quaintest position chosen by a Mopoke (Podargus 
strigoides), for her nest; there was a tall stump scarcely any 
thicker than a telegraph pole and just as straight and bare, 
though considerably taller, being fully fifty feet in height, and 
right on the jagged top, where it had broken off during the 
felling of the scrub sat the poor old Podargus, exposed to the 
full blaze of the sun. All day long she apparently sat there, 
oblivious to everything around her, only altering her position 
slightly and stiffening her head so that she seemed to become 
an actual part of the broken stump, if you threw anything 
near enough to attract her attention. Since I saw her I have 
been told that there are now two young ones sitting beside her 
and it is hard to believe that three of them can find room to 
perch on top of that narrow pole. My brother told me of one 
of our Mopoke’s nest which he found in the fairly low bough 
of an apple tree, one of the old birds sat on the nest, which 
contained a young one like a little white ball of fluff, and on 
the ground just beneath the other old bird sat on a similar 
chick. We could only imagine that the newly hatched infant 
had in some way overbalanced or been blown out by the wind, 
so was being cared for by one parent, while the other watched 
over the little one in the cradle above. 
On this same hill-side were more Coach-whip birds (Pso- 
phodes crepitans) than I had ever seen in any one place before; 
although the scrub had been cleared there was a great deal of 
undergrowth, and they used to hide in a dense thicket of small 
shrubs, locally known as “wild coffee.’ Silent during the heat 
