Aboriginal Australians -- Government relations; Dunk Island (Qld.); Natural history -- Australia -- Queensland
A spangled drongo--ardent lover of light and free air--talkatively
announced the dawn long before its coming; the noisy pitta--bird of the
moist soil and leafy gloom--triumphs in three notes. For an hour the
scrub fowl have been violently noisy, but have retired to the recesses
of the jungle, whence comes an occasional chuckle of satisfaction or
a coarse, triumphant crow. The fasciated honey-eater has loudly called
“with a voice that seemed the very sound of happiness”; the leaden
flycatcher, often silent but seldom still, has twittered and whispered
plaintively; the sun-birds are playing gymnastics among the lemon
blossoms, and the centre of activity for butterflies is the red-flowered
shrub bordering the wavering path.
Since--sometimes wantonly, often thoughtlessly--man interferes with
plants, time out of mind the banqueting-table of the butterflies, is
it not a duty to provide substitutes for devastated natural vegetation?
When it is discovered that a plant, introduced to give satisfaction to
the lust of the eye, provides from year's end to year's end nectar as
unfailing as the widow's cruse of oil, is it not becoming to reproduce
it plentifully so that excited and virtuous insects may be encouraged
to return to former scenes? If not a duty, at least it is a source of
happiness, for the particular insects which revel in the nectar of the
perpetually flowering shrub are the two most gorgeous butterflies of the
land--pleasantly known as Ulysses and Cassandra.
Science changes its titles so frequently that unless the intellect is
to be increasingly burdened it is well to refuse to be divorced from
the old and often explicit and fulfilling names. Cassandra is the lovely
green and gold fly which dances in the air so delightfully when he
woos his sober, fluttering mate. That of gorgeous royal blue with black
edging to the wings and dandyish swallow-tails, which wanders far and
wide and flies high and swiftly, is Ulysses.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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