Just as gay as the parrots, though very, very much smaller, is the red-headed honey-eater, or bloodbird, as he is more familiarly known. He is also a honey lover, and visits us when the trees are in blossom. His bright red-and-black coat makes a vivid spot of colour, and his pretty little song adds to the general harmony. The profusion of mistletoe in the wilderness brings us the mistletoe-bird. Few people really know this tiny steel-blue crimson-breasted fellow, or his plain grey little wife. Yet his single whistle, like that of a small boy who has just learned to whistle through his teeth, is one of the commonest sounds in the bush, and the mated birds call continuously when feeding in different clumps, as if they feared to lose touch with one another. One of the great charms of a wattle, which till lately stood beside my verandah, was that its leafy tops were beloved by the mistletoe-bird. When he had taken his fill of the luscious and viscid berries which dropped from the redgum by the gate, he would retire to the wattle, hide himself amongst the grey-green foliage, and pour out an ecstasy of song in the tiniest of voices. Many birds, even to so bold a fellow as the butcher-bird, have this habit of hiding amongst the thickest leaves and soliloquizing, but none has a more impassioned utterance than the little mistletoe-bird, though none has so slender a song. Sometimes we find their nest, one of the most wonderfully built of all birds’ nests. It is woven from fine plant fibres and silky seeds, and is hung from a slender twig, with a little entrance at the side; it is very like a little purse of felt, save that it is not so harsh to the touch as felt. [Illustration: _Spine-billed Honeyeater_] One more of our visitors I must mention, and that is the native canary, which comes each year, builds his little domed nest in a sapling, and fills the air with his sweet song. Then there are the everyday birds, the dear, familiar things which are with us all the year round. Every gardener knows them--blue wrens and tits, jacky winters and yellow robins, redheads and spinebills, peewees and kookaburras--they are the usual inhabitants of our suburban gardens, and dear to us all because of their friendly, fearless ways. Other birds come and go, but they stay with us all the time, building and breeding in the wilderness each spring. In the two years that I have known this wild patch I have counted seventy-two species of birds passing through. Some, as I have said, are there all the time; some come at certain seasons, sing for a space amongst the tree-tops, feed for a week or so on the berries and blossoms, then pass on to other feeding grounds, while others stay just for an hour, glad of a safe and sheltered resting-place on their long, mysterious journeys to and fro across the land. [Illustration: _So tame and friendly--Blue Wrens_]