44 SOME USEFUL AUSTRALIAN BIRDS. 



supplies are the seeds and honey blossoms of our larger forest trees, they 

 play an important part in the economy of nature and the life of our forest 

 trees. 



In Europe and America a large family of forest birds, popularly known as 

 woodpeckers, police the forests, and with their sharp-pointed beaks drill out 

 and destroy the thousands of wood-boring insects and their larvae that would 

 otherwise kill the trees. In Australia we have no representative of the 

 woodpeckers, but the Black Cockatoo with its powerful gnawing bill hunts 

 over the trunk and branches of infested trees and tears out great strips of 

 bark and wood, beneath which the wood-moth and beetle larvae are bur- 

 rowing and feeding. Mr. E. Palmer, of Lawson, once showed me the 

 stem of a gum-tree about 6 inches in diameter that had been cut right 

 through by a Black Cockatoo hunting out a wood-grub, and it is not an 

 uncommon thing to come across branches of wattles and gum-trees in the 

 valleys of the Blue Mountains torn and splintered in this manner where 

 the cockatoos have been at work. The black and silver wattles along our 

 coastal country are very much subject to the attacks of large white grubs, 

 the larvae of the goat-moths (Eudoxyla eucalypti). The branches and trunks 

 of these scrub trees as they mature are often full of these wood-borers, which 

 used to be sought after by our blackfellows in the old days. It is recorded 

 that the Black Cockatoos used to visit this country every season, and between 

 the two the wattles were more or less cleared of wood-borers before the 

 advent of the white man. 



With increasing settlement these shy birds have been shot, or driven out 

 of their old haunts, and this is probably why many of our wattles are now 

 such short-lived trees. As one of our few forest rangers, the Black Cockatoo 

 should be most carefully protected. 



The Dollar-bird (Eurystomus australis Swain). 



Gould's Handbook, vol. I, p. 119, No. 59; Leach's Bird Book, p. 105, No. 219. 



This bird is so widely known under the name of the Dollar-bird that I 

 adopt it in preference to that of the Australian Roller, though the latter may 

 be more exact. It belongs to a group of birds that are allied to the Kingfishers, 

 and it is our sole representative of a genus the members of which are scat- 

 tered over Africa, Madagascar, India, China, and the Malay Archipelago. 

 Many are migratory ; our species ranges from the Malay Islands and New 

 Guinea into New South Wales, where most of them nest. A few reach Yiof- 

 toria, but they are comparatively rare in the southern State. 



The Dollar-bird is one of our showy, handsome birds, and it also attracts 

 one's attention by its chattering cry. It usually takes up its post of obser- 

 vation on the limb of a dead tree or on a telegraph post and from such a 

 position it watches for insects flying past and darts out with its curious rolling 

 flight, exhibiting at the same time the characteristic rounded white patch in 

 the centre of the wing from which mark it derives its name. The stomach of 



