SOME USEFUL AUSTRALIAN BIRDS. 15 



worried, with the result that the hawks, crows, and otherflesh-eaters were killed 

 as well as the dogs. Within a few years the increase of the insectivorous 

 birds on the plains was very noticeable ; as the ploughman sent his team along 

 turning over the furro%v, one would see a whole string of magpies and Magpie- 

 larks behind him picking up the grubs and ^vorms exposed. The plough and 

 cultivator brought to hand a fresh, if temporary, increase of food, which meant 

 more nestlings. Then the reaction commenced, the food limit was reached ; 

 one morning the farmer saw magpies hunting over a paddock where the 

 wheat was just showing. At first he rejoiced to see his feathered friends at 

 work for him, probably at a plague of cut-worms or caterpillars. Later on 

 he crossed the paddock and found many young wheat plants pulled up and 

 the soft wheat at the rootlets bitten off. His scientific friend across the 

 creek, to whom he complainefl, said it was impossible ; magpies would not 

 eat wheat, they were insectivorous ; if they had pulled the wheat seedling 

 up it was to get at some grub on the roots. Unconvinced, the farmer a few 

 days later shot a couple of magpies that he had watched at work on his pad- 

 dock, and on making a rough post-mortem examination of their stomachs, 

 found the bulk of the contents to be soft, spongy wheat grains from the 

 ravished wheatfield. 



Then he took action and shot magpies until the survivors flew away in 

 disgust. Since then many thousands of magpies have been shot in both 

 Victoria and New South Wales for this acquired food habit. 



Again, we have several remarkable groups of birds in Australia which have 

 the tip of their tongue formed like regular little camel's hair brushes, so that 

 they can be inserted into the cup-like calyx of the eucalyptus and other 

 honey-bearing flowers, and the nectar thus drawn up into the mouth. These 

 honey-suckers, belonging to the family Meliphagidce, comprise over fifty 

 species of very beautiful birds. Gould says, " They are, in fact, to the fauna, 

 what the eucalypti, Banksise, and Melaleuca are to the flora of Australia. 

 The economy of these birds is so strictly adapted for those trees that the one 

 appears essential to the other ; for what can be more plain than that the 

 brush-like tongue so especially formed for gathering the honey from the 

 flower cups of the eucalypti, or that their diminutive stomachs are 

 especially formed for this kind of food, and the peculiar insects that form a 

 part of it." Yet the very possession of this wonderful mechanism has been 

 the undoing of several groups of the family ; orchards have been planted near 

 the forest or in land that once was forest, and the birds, investigating, found 

 that ripe fruit is just as good as honey, and when dead ripe is just as easily 

 sucked up into the mouth. Every orchardist knows what damage a party of 

 Leather-heads or Friar-birds can do in an orchard of ripe fruit. 



Then there is the W^hite-eye or Silver-eye, a dainty little bird closely allied 

 to the honey-suckers, and usually considered a useful bird (in some places called 

 the Blight-bird, for like the Blue-wren it comes flying through our gardens in 

 little flocks, creeping through the bushe? and picking off the aphis in large 



