The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-02-19

her head back, ruffied up the feathers
 on the lower part of her back above the
 tail, and there fixed the strip of bark.
 She then smoothed the feathers over 1t,
 and picked up and fixed another strip
 This was repeated till seven or even
 eight pieces of bark were stuck under
 the feathers. when the love bird rose
 and flew cautiously to the nest with
 her burden. Brehm thought that this
 habit was unique. But it is praeticed
 by another parrot. the gray headed love
 bird from Mada gascar. These birds
 have been seen to carry bits of grass
 and fibre and chips of wood and scraps
 of paper to their nests on their backs in
 the same way as the rosy-faced love
 bird does.
 Mrs. Cassirer (the first translator of
 Brehm's "Thierleben" into English, kept some of these Madagascar love
 birds in Paris. 1T have four nests from
 my white-heads, she wrote. and in each case the nesting material was car ried stuck between the feathers of the back, so that the bird resembled fret full porcupine" Other parrots which do not nest in holes in trees, as do the
 
 Cassirer. These are the glaucous ma cav mentioned by Azara, which scrapes hole like kingtisher's in the banks of streams; the splendid hyacinthine macaW, which scrapes out nesting holes in banks; Muller's parrot, which lays it's eggs in holes in rocks; and the Patago- nian parrot This bird has great colo nies in Chili, where 1t builds in solitary and precipitous cliffs, like the puffins on our coasts Like the sea-parrots" and sand martins, the Patagonian parrots or conures choose soft strata to burrow in, but their general habits are curious ly like those of the puffins. MT. Pop ping says of them: After toilsome march one approaches perpendicular cliff, and believes ones self in utter sol itude. The deepest stiffness reigns around, the sign of noon in equatorial America, when most creatures are asleep. Suddenly the warning cry of a parrot is heard. It is caught up and re- peated by others and before one can quite understand what is the matter, one is surrounded by flocks of these quarrelsome birds, which fly in narrow circles round the visitor, and threaten to attack him. Out of the numerous holes in the rock peer forth, comically enough, the round heads of the parrots, and those which do not fly out take part in the commotion by loud screams. Each hole is nest, burrowed out by the owners in the strata of clay which intersect the cliffs, and one may, not unfrequently count some hundreds of them" Some of the ground parrots nest in holes in tree roots, while the Quaker parrot, a small green species from South America makes a hause of enormous size Il proportion to the builders. A pair kept by MT. Buxton built a nest in an open portico on the top of a large vase from tWigs of the silver birch. When the nest was three rebuilt it till it was five feet high, and six feet in circumference at the top. In other words these little parrots built a nest much larger than that of heron or crow.
 Parrots as a race have very few ''ab- in type, consequently those which differ from the others attract more than their share of attention. Among these are the slender-biled cockatoo. the owl-parrots, and the flesh eating New Zealand Ikea" A colonist | owning a very large sheep farm told the | writer that he witnessed what was probably the origin of the keas taste for mutton. The fresh skins of dead ! sheep used to be hnung up or begged out with bits of fat adhering to them. The keas used to visit these and eat the | fat, and then connecting wool with food, attacked diseased and weakly sheep. | The slender billed cockatoo has a long thin upper mandible, projecting in a shaped curve more than half it's | length beyond the lower part of the | beak. This instrument is nsed to dig up bulbs, which they extract from the | hard soil baked by the sun, and is pos sibly of service to extract grubs from the grass-tree stems. The owl-parrots of New Zealand, with their streaky, | hairy plumage, resemble almost exactly . the thick moss which abounds on the damp hillsides which they haunt It is said that if surprised on the edge of a messy scaur or crag, they will just roll over the edge, without flying and squat in the moss below like a partridge though the creature is kind of vegeta- fian oWl.-London Spectator.