THE COCKATOO. (Plyctolophus galeritus.)
This bird is distinguished from the parrots, by a beautiful crest, composed of a tuft of elegant feathers, which he can raise or depress at pleasure. We meet with some of a beautiful white plumage, and the inside feathers of the crest of a pleasing yellow, with a spot of the same colour under each eye, and one upon the breast. The Cockatoos are natives of the Indian Islands and Australia, where they are found in great abundance. Their food consists of seeds and soft and stony fruits, which last their powerful bill enables them to break with ease. They are easily tamed when taken at an early age, after which they become familiar and even attached, but their imitative powers seldom go beyond a very few words added to their own cry of Cockatoo.
In a wild state they are shy, and cannot easily be approached. The flesh of the young birds is accounted very good eating. The female is said to make her nest in the rotten limbs of trees, using nothing more than the accumulation of vegetable mould formed by the decayed parts of the bough. The eggs are white, without spots; there are no more than two young at a time. The natives first find the nest by the pieces of bark and twigs which the old birds strip off the trees adjoining that in which the nest is situated. It is a remarkable fact that the bark is never stripped off the tree which contains the nest.
Mr. Bennet, in speaking of the large black Cockatoo of New Holland, says, that if this bird observes on the trunk of a tree indications of a larva being within, it diligently labours to get at it with its powerful beak, and should the object of its pursuit be deep within the wood, as often happens, the trunk becomes so extensively hacked, that a slight gust of wind will lay the tree prostrate.