LIFE IN STRANGE PLACES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 2288, 11 June 1921, Page 4

LIFE IN STRANGE PLACES.

LITTLE KNOWN' AUSTRALIA

For years past, Mr Sidney V\ illiam Jackson, a member of the Royal Australian Ornithologistss’ Association, has delved into the picturesque depths of little known, and for the most part unknown, Australia. He returned recently from the Maepherson Ranges in south-east. Queensland —ranges towering up to 4,000 feet, and garbed in an almost* impenetrable and strangely beautiful jungle' growth, in . many parts 100 and 200 feet high. Through this dense growth Mr Jackson cut his way in quest of the female of the little Rufous Scrub Bird (Atrichornis rufescens). The female has been hunted, but in vain, according to Mr Jackson, since ISGS, when the first male specimens were procured. On this range Mr Jackson secured two females, one in 1910 and the other last year. These females are so rare as to make this achievement one of great scientific value. He secured also the young birds of the species—the first young ones, it is said, known directly to science. This little bird, although it can fly short distances, rarely uses its wings, but runs about liko a mouse—and is even more difficult to catch than a mouse. Its home is on the ground, under all this jungle mass. Even its notes mislead, for it is a mimic and ventriloquist, and its habit of burrowing under the loose, fallen leaves, thicker than all the autumn leaves that fall, has won for it the nickname of the “feathered mouse ” It exists only in a little speck of Australia, lying between the Maepherson Ranges on the north to a little below the Bellinger River on the south.

Another of Mr Jackson s expeditions was into far-western Queensland, out on the great plains of the Diamnntina, to study the habits of the letter-winger kites, a handsome bird, so named because when m flight ils wings form together the letter W. It lives mainly- on longhaired, massive, ugly rats, of a kind indigenous to Central Australia, which were, during Mr Jackson s visit, found in the Diamantina country in countless millions. The rats arc nocturnal in’their habit.-, and so these birds, living mainly upon them, have also become nocturnal. It is held that the rats eat their females, and are thus gradually exterminating themselves. Mr Jackson and his parly killed 600 of the rats when camped near a water hole, and there was not a female among them. All over these vast plains arc the tracks of the rats, tracks suggestive of the footmarks' of travelling sheep. They live in crevices in the ground, and Mr Jackson say- Iho common kite hawk will follow tra\ellers for miles across the pminduring the day in the hope that they will disturb these crevices and leave the rats a prey to them. The movement.- of the letter-winged kites are influenced by the movements of the rats. If the rats decide oil a long march, of even hundreds of miles, the birds will surely be found there also. When the droughts are sever# inland the birds come right on to the coast; last year a few specimen*- were picked up dead on the tipper Hunter, proving that they had been starved out inland and had shifted camp.