g hairs, into the tubes of many big tropical blossoms.
The lories, indeed, live entirely on nectar, and they are so common in
the region they have made their own that all the larger flowers there
have been developed with a special view to their tastes and habits, as
well as to the structure of their peculiar brush-like honey-collector.
In most parrots the mouth is dry and the tongue horny; but in the
lories it is moist and much more like the same organ in the
humming-birds and sun-birds. The prevalence of very large and
brilliantly coloured flowers in the Malayan region must be set down for
the most part to the selective action of these aesthetic and
colour-loving little brush-tongued parrots.

Australia and New Zealand, as everybody knows, are the countries where
everything goes by contraries. And it is here that the parrot group has
developed some of its strangest and most abnormal offshoots. One would
imagine beforehand that no two birds could be more unlike in every
respect than the gaudy, noisy, gregarious cockatoos and the sombre,
nocturnal, solitary owls. Yet the New Zealand owl-parrot is, to put it
plainly, a lory which has assumed all the outer appearance and habits
of an owl. A lurker in the twilight or under the shades of night,
burrowing for its nest in holes in the ground, it has dingy brown
plumage like the owls, with an undertone of green to bespeak its parrot
origin: while its face is entirely made up of two great disks,
surrounding the eyes, which succeed in giving it a most marked and
unmistakable owl-like appearance.

Now, why should a parrot so strangely disguise itself and belie its
ancestry? The reason is plain. It found a place for it ready made in
nature. New Zealand is a remote and sparsely-stocked island, peopled by
mere casual waifs and strays of life from adjacent but still very
distant continents. There are no dangerous enemies there. Here, then,
was a clear chance for a nightly prowler. The owl-parrot with true
business instinct saw the opening thus clearly laid before it, and took
to a nocturnal and burrowing life, with the natural consequence that it
acquired in time the dingy plumage, crepuscular eyes, and broad
disk-like reflectors of other prowling night-fliers. Unlike the owls,
however, the owl-parrot, true to the vegetarian instincts of the whole
lory race, lives almost entirely upon sprigs of mosses and other
creeping plants. It is thus essentially a ground bird; and as it feeds
a