THE COMPETITIONS

Evening Star, Issue 22460, 3 October 1936, Page 8

THE COMPETITIONS

Here are two different puzzles. The under-tens have to find the way in which to draw straight lines through the penguin’s eggs; the over-tens to read a picture sentence about a great American President. Send your answers to Big Brother care_ * Evening Star,’ Stuart street, Dunedin. Dunedin, C.l. Mark the envelope ‘ Competition.”

Nesting Logins about August, and is preceded by .much demonstrative courtship, in which the spreading and displaying of the tail is an important ceremony. The site selected may be near a creek or other natural clearing, and the nest itself be commenced in a medium-sized fork near the outer cud of a branch, sometimes within 10ft of the ground. Both birds take part in building, until the compact, cup-shaped nest is finished, its upper rim bound down smoothly with cobwebs, and its lower extremity tailed off with chips of wood and strands of web. Within three .days three eggs are laid, pale cream in colour, speckled lightly with greyish brown. Incubation also is a joint responsibility, and periods of from 10 to 15 minutes are spent by male and female bird in turn sitting on the eggs. These are rarely left unguarded, for the sitting bird does not leave the nest until the free partner returns. The chicks are hatched naked, but grow rapidly, and are well feathered in a few days. A new nest is built for a second brood, and this second family is on the wing as a rule not later than February. Among fantails in the South Island, and to a lesser extent in the North Islaiid, a fair percentage are entirely black. As these black birds often breed separately from the pied birds, and birds of intermediate colours are unknown, black fantails are regarded as belonging to a different species. That they are not entirely separate from the pied, however, is shown by the fact that a pied and a black bird may pair and raise a mixed brood—some black and some pied but never apparently of mixed colours. This tendency for a black form of a normally black and ■white species to occur is known as melanism. No plant food of any kind is included in the diet of fantails, hut they devour a wide range of insects in both grub and flying stages. Tn relation to human welfare, then, these birds may be regarded as beneficial in a material sense as well as being a constant inspiration to cheerfulness.