14 The Australian Lyre Bird. 



THE AUSTRALIAN" LYRE BIRD. 



BY " AN OLD BUSHMAN/'' 



The Lyre Bird, or native pheasant of Australia, Menura 

 superba of naturalists, called Bulla bulla by the natives, from 

 the peculiar monotonous call-note of the female, is, as far 

 as body plumage goes, a very plain, dull-coloured bird, about 

 the size of the common English pheasant ; but its singular 

 beauty consists in a long, beautiful, lyre-shaped tail of six- 

 teen feathers, with the peculiar form of which most of your 

 readers are, doubtless, acquainted. According to Mr. Gould, 

 the stronghold of the lyre bird is in the colony of New South 

 Wales ; but to my certain knowledge it is, or at least was, a few 

 years since, common in most of the ranges and gullies ex- 

 tending eastwards from the Bass River to the Tarra in Gipps' 

 Laud, and also in the gullies on the Plenty, Dandenong, and 

 Gipps' Land ranges. It is from the personal observations of 

 myself and a friend, now stationed in this district for the pur- 

 pose of collecting, that the following notes are compiled : — 



Of the numbers of those who at one time or another must 

 have seen and admired its fibrous and lyre-shaped tail, but 

 few were perhaps aware of the fact that the light and fairy- 

 like structure before them was the elegant appendage of a 

 bird whose powers as a ventriloquist and imitator of sounds 

 appear to be illimitable. To be able to form a fair estimate, 

 however, of their extraordinary abilities in this respect, one 

 must be on the pheasant ground by earliest dawn on any fine 

 morning during the months of June, ^July, and August, this 

 being their breeding season, during which they are most 

 noisy. Now this is not quite so easy as might at first appear, 

 since what the bushmen call their " whistling heaps" — little 

 circular mounds of scratched-up earth in the centre of a mass 

 of ferns, or sword grass — are generally located in the thickest 

 part of a dense musk scrub, or by the sides or at the bottom 

 of a deep fern-tree gully, whose cloistral shades, like true 

 recluses, they greatly affect. To pierce such solitudes as these 

 before the sun has risen, struggling up to the waist through 

 a thick undergrowth of grass and fern, saturated with ever- 

 lasting dew, at the imminent risk of breaking either neck or 

 shins in stumbling over some of the numberless fallen logs 

 that intercept your path, and where every step you take 

 necessarily brings you into collision with an overhanging bough 

 which discharges a copious shower-bath over your head and 

 shoulders, is, to say the least of it, not pleasant, and not likely 

 often to be attempted by any one, save those actually in pursuit 

 of the bird itself. 



