DUCKS

Black Duck ANAS SUPERCILIOSA. 
Grey Teal NETTION (ANAS) GIBBERIFRONS.

Why have we no residential parrot, though cockatoos are plentiful; no scrub turkey though the megapode scampers in all directions in the jungle; no common black crow, nor butcher bird, though other shrikes (the magpie for instance) come and go; no wren, no finch, no lark?  Scrub turkeys (TALLEGALLA LATHAMI), mound builders like the megapode, are plentiful all along the coast, at certain seasons visiting the scrub which margins the opposite beach, but they are not found on these islands.  The blue mountain parrot (red-collared lorikeet), the red-winged lory, the black cockatoo (Leach’s), and other well-known species, fleet and venturesome, to whom two miles and a half of “salt, estranging sea” cannot be any check, certainly do not use the island for nesting as birds of “innocent and quiet minds” might.  Gauze-winged butterflies flit across the channel, occasionally in great numbers.  What law restrains virile birds from the venture?

The absence among the residents of swimming birds, save the beach frequenters, is due to the lack of open fresh water, though there are indications of the past existence of at least one swamp, and also that it was drained naturally by the fretting away of a sand ridge by the sea.

How is it, that though we have echidna in three different colours—­black, grey and straw—­there is no typical marsupial, large or small, no iguana (rather, monitor lizard), though a fair variety of other reptiles, from white, house-haunting geckoes to carpet snakes?  Though the CYCAS Media is plentiful on the seaward slopes of the adjacent mainland, no trace of that interesting old-world plant has been discovered here. and but one casual representative has been found of the graceful fan palm (LICUALA MUELLERI), another relic of the far beginning of Australia.  No doubt the seed whence the single fan palm sprung would be brought hither by a nutmeg pigeon; but there is no bird-carrier for the cycad, and the set of the current is opposed to its transport by the sea.

In birds and in mammals and in plants, wide-spread Australian groups are unrepresented.

THE DAYBREAK FUGUE

Before there is any visible sign of the break of day, some keener and finer perception than man possesses reveals it to the noisy pitta, or dragoon bird, which in duty bound makes prompt proclamation.  Man trusts to mechanism to check off the watches of the night; birds to a self-contained grace more sensitive if not so viciously exact.  The noisy pitta bustles along the edge of the jungle rousing all the sleepy heads with sharp interrogative whistles before there is the least paling of the Eastern sky.  He scents the sun as the ghost of Hamlet’s father the morning air.  His version of “Sleepers, wake,” echoes in the silence in sharp, staccato notes.  Seldom heard during the heat of the day, they are oft repeated at dusk and late in the evening.  Of all the birds of the day his voice is the last as well as the first, and from that the natives derive his name, “Wung-go-bah.”