Page:The Emu volume 4.djvu/185

 , but his dawn notes resemble the following:—"Toll-de-lol-fah" (the last note long drawn out and of liquid sweetness); then twice and quickly repeated in a lower key—"You chatterbox;" then in a higher key and with very full, rounded notes, and twice repeated—"Sweet after forty." So charmed was I with the song and appearance of these birds that I determined to secure one to take home with me. Through the kind offices of Mr. Lee Steere, I eventually managed to get one from one of the station hands, and my captive has furnished me with many opportunities of study. The diet I give him is principally that of meat, but he has a distinct liking for oatmeal or pollard paste, and a still greater one for grapes. For the latter he will leave his meat food at once. The meat when offered is invariably seized with the bill and if small is threshed on the spell and then run through the mandibles. If large, it is similarly seized, and with surprising quickness is tucked under one foot and torn to pieces, after the manner of some birds of prey. The bird is a very small eater—Gymnorhina dorsalis will, as I have tested, eat four times as much at one meal. After satiety, a "larder" is made of any surplus meat in a convenient corner of the cage. Probably the fact of the slender appetite of these birds, in combination with a difficulty in obtaining regular supplies when wanted, has led to the natural habit of the Butcher-Birds in making their "larders." My captive began to moult in the middle of January last (he is a one-year-old bird) but up to the present (the middle of February) the moult is not completed. The breast feathers have changed from a discoloured white to pure white; the brown gorget on the chest shows a black area on its lower margin; the brown feathers of the sides of the head and face are being supplanted by black ones; the mantle and neck feathers have changed from brown to black, but these latter, in turn, are changing to white, the white colour beginning on the outer margins of the feathers. Being anxious to ascertain whether these birds had the sense of smell developed as regards their food, I made and repeated the following test:—Approaching with an empty hand concealed behind my back, the bird was indifferent to my approach. Returning inside the house and coming back with my hand similarly concealed, but containing meat, the bird at once fluttered its wings and uttered its baby cry for food. Why should the members of the genus Gymnorhina be ambulators and the members of the genus Cracticus be hoppers? Has the continuous search for food of the former on the ground brought about, by degrees, ambulation?

These birds build their nests in the flooded gums. One pair, on Ebano camp, had their nest in one of these trees and brought out their young, three in number. The photograph (Plate X.) shows a native climbing the tree for the nest. The aboriginal name is "Cudgeego."

Pachycephala jalcata (Gould).—I am in doubt whether I am correct in identifying this species as the above, for the same reason that I am in doubt whether it is really separable from P. rufiventris.