Page:The Emu volume 3.djvu/266

 evidently were all out and well advanced, for two of the birds we shot were strong fledglings.

We were fortunate in observing in the same gully, in the early stages of our explorations, a pair of Cinclosoma castanonotum. To observe them, however, was one matter, but to secure them was quite another. We found them always in the same spot, but after once flushing them it was almost impossible to sight them again. Hour after hour and day after day were spent in earnest but unsuccessful quest until, on the last day but one, Mr. Conigrave, after an hour's waiting, managed to shoot a male. A second bird was shortly afterwards secured, which proved to be a young male, and subsequent to that again I shot a young female. The thick undergrowth afforded them the best of concealment, and they were never at any time slow in availing themselves of it. To accentuate the difficulty of capture, they do not utter either an alarm note or song. The only sound we heard them make was a faint "tsee, tsee," and this only appeared to be a call-note to the young after we had separated them—a habit common with Turnix varia in similar circumstances. The plumage of the young did not, as might have been thought, resemble the adult female. Instead of the light slate-grey breast of the latter, they were blotched diffusely with dark brown and greyish-white. The back, however, showed the cinnamon colour very distinctly. Probably they assume another phase of plumage more nearly approaching that of the female before they reach maturity. The species seems not only local in habit, but very sparsely distributed. Excepting those mentioned we only saw another pair, and those not in the mountains but in some casuarina scrub on the brackish saltbush plains.

A very common bird everywhere in the Hills was Sericornis (Pyrrholæmus) brunnea. During the first morning's outing in the low scrubs I met with a family of them. The whole brood, headed by the parent birds, passed where I stood, hopping swiftly along the ground and through the undergrowth, each uttering a subdued, plaintive, single note, which produced a singular effect. The song of the adult bird when not en famille is quite different, and consists of a series of loud, cheery notes frequently uttered whilst hopping through the scrubs. They enlivened the hill-lands very much with their distinctive song. We found, too, that they were not above borrowing their neighbours' notes. One morning Mr. Conigrave and I followed what we took to be a Calamanthus, or Field-Lark, through the dwarf scrubs on the hillside. After some time we espied the bird sought for sitting at the foot of a small shrub and uttering the same notes. My companion shot him, and on picking him up found him to be, not the species his song denoted, but Sericornis brunnea. The Wongan Hills bird is slightly smaller than those from the north-west and the interior, and the throat-patch is much less extensive, and is a deep rusty-red.

One of the gems of the collection was Malurus leucopterus,