PARROTS AND COCKATOOS 255 



south-eastern and southern Australia and Tasmania, and is the sole member of 

 its genus. 



The grass-parraquets of the exclusively Australian and Tasmanian genus 

 Neophema, with more than half a dozen species, justify in most cases their 

 popular name by their habits. One of them, the rock-parraquet (A. petrophila), 

 breeds, however, on the coast of South Australia, especially on Goat Island in 

 Kellidie Bay. That island, which is barely half an acre in extent, consists of 

 soft limestone rock, rising in cliffs 20 feet high, the cliffs being honeycombed with 

 holes and the flat summit strewn with boulders, some of which have been piled into 

 cairns. On the cliffs many of the eggs of the parraquets are laid in holes a yard 

 or so in depth, but on the summit of the island many clutches are to be found 

 beneath flat stones which happen to be raised a few inches above the ground by 

 fragments of rock. One nest was jammed in between two vertical slabs of rock 

 close to the water's edge. The usual number of eggs in a clutch appears to be 

 four, although the above-mentioned nest contained five young birds, and several 

 nests were found containing only three eggs. The nestlings are at first clothed 

 in a pale yellowish grey down, quite unlike the brilliant golden-green plumage of 

 their parents. This is not the only parrot in the Antipodes which nests amid rocks, 

 where the eggs, when not deposited in holes, form conspicuous objects evidently out 

 of harmony with their environment. The second is the New Zealand parrot, which, 

 as noticed in a later chapter, lays its eggs and rears its young high up in the 

 mountains amid glaciers and snowstorms. 



Another species that should be mentioned is the royal parrot {Platycercus 

 scapulatus), one of the largest and most beautiful members of this group, which 

 is nearly the size of a magpie, and has the head and under-parts bright scarlet, 

 the back and wings dark green, the shoulders light green, the lower part of the 

 back blue like the upper tail-coverts and a band round the neck, and the tail black. 

 The beak is red at the base above, with the tip and lower half blackish. The 

 female, on the other hand, is almost entirely green above, although the under- 

 parts are red. 



The cockatoos, Cacatuidw, which are as essentially an Australian type as the 

 broadtails, are sociable birds, frequently nesting together in large companies, and too 

 well known to all to need much in the way of description. A curious fact in 

 connection with the eyes of cockatoos is that while up to the age of about five 

 years they are brightly coloured, those of male birds about that age turn black. The 

 fact has an important bearing on the determination of the sexes in the great 

 black cockatoo, Calyptorhynchus banksi. Cockatoos associate in large colonies, 

 and nest either in holes in decaying trees or in rocky gullies; and at the 

 close of the breeding-season these colonies take to wandering about the country, 

 spending the night amid the foliage of the tree-tops, and starting again in the 

 early morning in search of food. The nature of their food varies to a considerable 

 extent in the different species. In the slender-billed group, for instance, of which 

 Licmetis nasica, a South Australian species of the size of a rook, is a well-known 

 example, the food consists chiefly of bulbs, which the birds dig out of the ground 

 with their long beaks. As a second member of the same group, mention may be 

 made of the somewhat larger burrowing cockatoo (L. pastinator) of Western 



