176 BIRDS OF THE DISTRICT OF GEELONG 
eight or ten, at a height of perhaps 30 feet from the 
ground, and usually travelling in the early morning 
and from west to east, as if moving camp from the 
Otway Ranges towards the hills of Gippsland. The 
long, unwieldy-looking tail distinguishes them from 
all other birds. 
To revert to the cry, I think the syllables " Wy-la," 
which Gould says is the name by which the Hunter 
River blacks called it, represent the sounds very 
well ; better, perhaps, than " Eeyeuk," by which our 
local aborigines knew it, though clearly both names 
are imitations of the call. The food of the Black 
Cockatoo consists partly of seed-pods and partly of 
tree-dwelling insects. I have seen a flock feeding 
on young pine-cones in the plantation at the You 
Yangs. 
It never nests in this district, but may still do so 
in the less-settled parts of the Otway, Mr. Mulder 
having been informed in 1894, by selectors at Bambra, 
that the birds then bred in the depths of the forest 
in holes in giant gums. And on November 15 th in 
that year, in the same locality, he was attracted by 
a noise like that of a cross-cut saw, and found it 
proceeded from a young Black Cockatoo, about which 
the parent birds were flying. 
He informs me that there the chief food of the 
species was grubs harbouring in the rotten wood 
and under the bark of dead and dying trees, which the 
birds easily tore off with their powerful bills. They 
were not nice birds to skin, having a smell like half- 
