1922. | Mound-building Birds of Australia. 703 mound is used season after season, the birds scratching out tunnels from two to five feet deep, penetrating the mounds at an angle of 45 degrees. The eggs of one laying bird are five or six in number, each being placed in a separate tunnel, two to three feet from its neighbour.

The tunnel in nest No. IT. had been filled in with green leaves, and a trail sixty feet Jong led up to the place where the newly laid eggs had been placed.

When nest No. I. was opened, the young man who had worked his way, several feet head-first, into the filled-in tunnel began to make frantic efforts to get out quickly, calling in muffled tones for help. His companions hauled him out by his heels, when out flew a fully fledged chick, which was secured and the skin sent down to the writer. This skin is now, I believe, in the British Museum. It seems that the newly hatched chick was commencing to work itself out, and finding the intruding hand, pecked it vigorously. The young man thought he had been bitten by a snake and naturally was a good deal frightened.

In the case of the Megapodius mounds, the fermentation of the leaves and debris filled into the tunnel-like openings produces sufticient heat under the moist tropical conditions to fully incubate the eggs. As the young have to fend for themselves directly they are hatched, Nature provides that they shall be able to run and fly immediately on leaving the egg.

Alectura lathami Lath. Serub- or Brush-Turkey. I have met with this bird in the Blackall Range in southern Queensland and in the semi-tropical brush or forest of northern New South Wales. The country in which these birds oceur is moist and tropical. In the first-named locality, we in October 1903 located a recently made nesting-mound of the above species. It was placed at the base of a large Moreton Bay Fig-tree. The leafage overhead was very thick, and the debris and dead leaves underneath had been proportionately thick, but for a radius of fifty feet from the mound the ground had been raked bare, 3A 2