Page:Acclimatisation; its eminent adaptation to Australia.djvu/22

20 honey-eating birds; the eucalypti or gum trees, by the tricholossi or honey-eating parrots, and ptiloti, another group of the honey-eaters; the towering fig trees by the regent and satin birds; the palms by the carpophagæ, or fruit-eating pigeons; and the grassy plains by the ground pigeons and grass paroquets.

The circumstance of the boles of the trees in this country being destitute of a thick corrugated rind or bark, will doubtless account for the total absence of any member of the genus picus or woodpecker—a group of birds found in all parts of the world, with the exception of Australia and Polynesia.

The birds represent many of the types found in Europe; yet the Australian continent possesses genera exclusively its own, many of which are nocturnal—probably more in proportion than are to be found in any other country, and a remarkable feature connected with Australian ornithology is that of its comprising several forms endowed with the power of sustaining and enjoying life without a supply of water, that element without which most creatures languish and die.

Many of the Australian birds also display an extraordinary fecundity, breeding three or four times in a season, but laying fewer eggs in the early spring when insect life is less developed, and a greater number later in the season, when the supply of insect food has become more abundant. One bird, the black swan, is as prolific in England as in its native country, producing four broods in one year, and proves a very profitable bird to the owner. So well has this Australian bird been acclimatised in England, that during my recent visit to that country, Mr. Wolf, the celebrated animal artist, had visited Mr. Gurney's residence in the country, at that gentleman's request, to make a drawing of one rearing its brood in the winter in the midst of the snow, which drawing I had an opportunity of seeing, and it displayed the old bird, with its sooty-plumaged young, nestled near the banks of an icy river, their dark plumage contrasting with the whiteness of the snow around them.

In Australia, the parrots are a numerous family, forming four large groups. The large cockatoos, such as the black cockatoos, who procure their food of grubs, &c., from the Banksiæ, casuarinæ, or eucalypti; the cacatuæ, such as the rose and crimson crested cockatoos &c., feeding upon the bulbs of plants, more particularly the orchids; the honey-eating parrots (trichoglossi), with their feathered tongue and no gizzard, such as the blue mountain and other parrots, subsisting only upon the nectar extracted from the blossoms of the gum trees and other flowering trees yielding honey; and the