A SHEEP DROVER. [PAGE 26].

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Some very beautiful parrots flash through the Australian forest. It would not be possible to tell of all of them. The smallest, which is known as the grass parrakeet, or “the love-bird,” is about the size of a sparrow. I notice it in England carried around by gipsies and trained to pick out a card which “tells you your fortune.” From that tiny little green bird the range of parrots runs up to huge fowl with feathers of all the colours of the rainbow. There are two fine cockatoos also in Australia—the white with a yellow crest, and the black, which has a beautiful red lining to its sable wings. A flock of black cockatoos in flight gives an impression of a sunset cloud, its under surface shot with crimson.

Cockatoos can be very destructive to crops, especially to maize, so the farmers have declared war upon them. The birds seem to be able to hold their own pretty well in this campaign, for they are of wonderful cunning. When a crowd of cockatoos has designs on a farmer’s maize-patch, the leader seems to prospect the place thoroughly; he acts as though he were a general, providing a safe bivouac for an army; he sets sentinels on high trees commanding a view of all points of danger. Then the flock of cockatoos settles on the maize and gorges as fast as it can. If the farmer or his son tries to approach with a gun, a sentinel cockatoo gives warning and the whole flock clears out to a place of safety. As soon as the danger is over they come back to the feast.

Even more cunning is the Australian crow. It is a bird of prey and perhaps the best-hated bird in the world. An Australian bushman will travel a whole day to kill a crow. For he has, at the time when the sheep were lambing, or when, owing to drought, they were weak, seen the horrible cruelties of the crow. This evil bird will attack weak sheep and young lambs, tearing out their eyes and leaving them to perish miserably. There have even been terrible cases where men lost in the Bush and perishing of thirst have been attacked by crows and have been found still alive, but with their eyes gone.

It is no wonder that there is a deadly feud between man and crow. But the crow is so cunning as to be able to overmatch man’s superior strength. A crow knows when a man is carrying a gun, and will keep out of range then; if a man is without a gun the crow will let him approach quite near. One can never catch many crows in the same district with the same device; they seem to learn to avoid what is dangerous. Very rarely can they be poisoned, no matter how carefully the bait is prepared.

Bushmen tell all sorts of stories of the cunning of the crow. One is that of a man who suffered severely from a crow’s depredations on his chickens. He prepared a poisoned bait and noticed the bird take it, but not devour it; that crow carefully took the poisoned tit-bit and put it in front of the man’s favourite dog, which ate it, and was with difficulty saved from death! Another story is that of a man who thought to get within reach of a crow by taking out a gun, lying down under a tree, and pretending to be dead. True enough, the crow came up and hopped around, as if waiting for the man to move, and so to see if he were really dead. After awhile, the crow, to make quite sure, perched on a branch above the man’s head and dropped a piece of twig on to his face! It was at this stage that the man decided to be alive, and, taking up his gun, shot the crow.

There may be some exaggeration in the bushmen’s tales of the crow’s cunning, but there is quite enough of ascertained fact to show that the bird is as devilish in its ingenuity as in its cruelty. In most parts of Australia there is a reward paid for every dead crow brought into the police offices. Still, in spite of constant warfare, the bird holds its own, and very rarely indeed is its nest discovered—a signal proof of its precautions against the enmity of man.