AZURE OR WATER KINGFISHER 197 
Mr. Noel Dyson was good enough to send me a 
description of a nest which he found in the steep 
banks of Airey's Creek on December 30th, 191 2. 
" The hole," he says, " was about 2 feet long, 
sloping down towards the entrance. The nesting- 
chamber was fairly large, and full of fish-bones and 
the like ; in it were six eggs, five of them hard-set, 
but the sixth very slightly incubated." 
The only nest I have myself found was, strangely 
enough, quite close to the one Mr. Dyson describes ; 
it was in January, 1892, and I should think it quite 
likely, indeed certain, that the birds had bred in the 
same locality during each one of the intervening 
twenty years. The eggs are glossy white. 
On the Erskine River at Lorne there are still one 
or two pairs. 
LAUGHING JACKASS OR GIANT KING- 
FISHER 
Dacelo gigas gigas 
Perhaps it is not a very far cry in a bird's mind from 
fish, via eels, to snakes ; at all events the habit of 
pouncing suddenly from a tree upon a snake in the 
grass, and returning to the tree to devour the catch, 
is the only thing about the Laughing Jackass which 
suggests, even by analogy, that he is in truth a King- 
fisher. I used rather to doubt the reputed virtues 
of the Jackass as a snake-killer, which certainly have 
