Page:The Emu volume 9.djvu/249

 (Haliastur sphenurus).—A pair were nesting in a tall eucalypt near Milly Pool. The nest was a very massive one. On the ground below were sticks enough to have constructed a second nest. Without a rope ladder this nest was quite inaccessible. It was at a height of 70 feet, or thereabouts, in a flooded gum, and for 30 feet the bole of the tree was without a branch. In passing, I may state that these flooded gums are very treacherous to climb, big limbs breaking off without any warning. Nearly all old trees are hollow, and the wood is much subject to the attacks of termites. I had already sustained one fall, a limb as thick as my thigh breaking off close to the trunk. Luckily, I fell into a dam of water.

(Falco lunulatus).—I only met with this species in the forest of eucalypts near Milly Pool. Though there was more than one pair about, I could find no nests. I regret to say an individual was wantonly shot and thrown away by a local "sportsman."

(Hieracidea berigora).—Not so common as the following, but where I found one there I found the other. This species does not seem to choose the large eucalypts to breed in, but prefers a tree in a more open situation. I took typical eggs at Bore Well, and again near Milly Pool. The latter nest was in a solitary and stunted flooded gum growing in the centre of an extensive and open plain.

(Hieracidea orientalis).—More common than the preceding species. The large, dark females, standing sentinel-like on some dead tree or bush, were a familiar sight. I found several nests, but only obtained eggs in one instance. This was a very rough nest, probably the adapted wreck of an old Pomatorhirnts rubeculus nest. It was placed on a horizontal branch of a beef-wood tree. The eggs were only obtained with difficulty and with the aid of a scoop. Young in down are fawn coloured.

(Cerchneis cenchroides).—This species was generally distributed throughout the district, though nowhere common. It was, perhaps, most frequent near Milly Pool, where the numerous hollow eucalypts afforded convenient nesting-places. The first nest I found was in the hollow spout of a large flooded gum at the north-east end of the pool. It was only a few chains away from my tent, and my attention was called to it by hearing the querulous cries of the parent birds. The nesting site was only about 25 feet from the ground, and I could look right into the hollow limb and see the four handsome eggs lying on a bed of decayed wood. These eggs were of the type in which the whole of the shell is quite obscured by the rich ferruginous markings. The eggs from a second nest in a similar situation lower down the pool were totally different. The markings in this case were distributed in large blotches, leaving spaces of the shell quite bare. They reminded me irresistibly of well-marked eggs of the European Sparrow-Hawk (Accipiter nisus). A third nest, on the opposite side of the pool, was in a hollow left by the snapping off of the main trunk of the tree. I was having a bath—or, rather, a wallow in the mud—when I saw the female enter the hollow. I walked round to the tree and climbed it. Someone had previously chopped out a Parrot or Cockatoo's nest, leaving a convenient orifice. Thinking the female had left the nest, as I could see the four eggs, I put in my hand and safely withdrew three of them. When making for the fourth, she made a vicious drive at my hand with her claws, and I can still see the scars she left. These eggs were intermediate in type between the two former sets. A fourth nest, which I reached after a lot of labour in chopping steps up the slippery trunk of a flooded gum, contained only two newly-hatched young. The majority of the males of this species have a bar at the end of the tail, which is very pale grey, but what I take to be old males have the tail nearly white and with no bar. All females I have seen possess the bar, and usually show fine black streaks on the breast. I observed no pairs breeding in old Crows' or other open nests. I quite expected local birds would prove to the the Western Kestrel (C. unicolor).