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In birds it is almost as peculiar. It has no woodpeckers and no pheasants families which exist in every other part of the world; but instead of them it has the mound-making brush-turkeys, the honeysuckers, the cockatoos, and the brush-tongued lories, which are found nowhere else upon the globe.
The felonious cuckoo drops her foundlings unawares in another bird's nest: the ostrich trusts her unhatched offspring to the heat of the burning desert sand: and the Australian brush-turkeys, with vicarious maternal instinct, collect great mounds of decaying and fermenting leaves and rubbish, in which they deposit their eggs to be artificially incubated, as it were, by the slow heat generated in the process of putrefaction.
It took us some time to do this. As soon as the pen was finished we put the brush-turkeys for such we supposed they were inside it, throwing in at the same time a supply of food. The little creatures ran round and round, but finding they could not get out, began to peck away at the food.
In birds it is less striking, although still very clear, for all the remarkable old-world forms which are absent from the one are equally so from the other, such as Pheasants, Grouse, Vultures, and Woodpeckers; while Cockatoos, Broad-tailed Parrots, Podargi, and the great families of the Honeysuckers and Brush-turkeys, with many others, comprising no less than twenty-four genera of land-birds, are common to both countries, and are entirely confined to them.
Crossing this narrow strait to Lombok, the birds I have mentioned are no longer to be found; but instead of them there are brush-turkeys, cockatoos, honey-suckers, and other Australian birds. These birds again are not to be found in Java or any region to the west. Crossing from Borneo to Celebes, there is a very great difference in the animals.
Instead also of the various birds which exist in other parts of the world, it has the mound-making brush-turkeys, the cockatoos, and the brush-tongued lories, as well as honey-suckers, to be found in no other part of the world. These peculiarities are discovered in the other islands I have mentioned, forming the Austro-Malayan division of the archipelago.
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