Page:An Australian Parsonage.djvu/252

Rh When cooked these birds are a very dainty dish, but their predilection for the "berry poison" renders great care necessary in preparing them for the table, and also in preventing dogs and cats from eating the entrails.

There is, however, amongst edible birds none that can at all compare with the one known to natives as the Ngowa, and to naturalists as the Leipoa, which is one species of those birds that have gained a front rank amongst feathered celebrities, by practising a system of artificial incubation. It lays its eggs in a mound of grass and leaves, which it heaps together to the size of twenty or thirty feet in circumference, and two or three in height, and then keeps watch in a thicket nigh at hand for the moment when the chicks are ready to leave the shell.

The Ngowa is larger than a pheasant, which in taste it exactly resembles, but it has not the pheasant's tail, and its shape is rather that of the blackcock; the feathers are beautifully dappled white and brown, the latter inclining to red. A person once told us that he had heard of Ngowa's eggs being hatched by a barn-door fowl, and that a cross-breed had been obtained between these tame Ngowas and common poultry; but, though we saw no reason to think the story improbable, it was one that we were never able positively to substantiate.

Many birds existed in the colony which were so rarely seen near the settled districts that, in spite of Khourabene's sportsmanship, we should never have become acquainted with them had not one winter been so unusually dry as to compel them to venture from the wild eastward sand plains to our district in search of water. That the Ngowa was one of these we had a proof in the curiosity