THE BIRDS OF AUSTRALIA. 
occasions and satisfied myself they were not breeding : they seemed cautious 
and shy, and would have been difficult to shoot.’ Mr. H. L. White’s note 
reads : 4 C. banksi is rather more numerous than C. funereus , and occupies 
the same class of country. The birds appear to be very fond of the seed of 
the Casuarina, which grows plentifully on the hills about here. I have not 
seen or heard of a nest in this district, but have noted young birds almost 
every year.’ ” 
Dr. Macgillivray , writing from Broken Hill, New South Wales, stated: 
44 Banks’ Black Cockatoo is found along the Darling River and its tributaries 
from Menindie upwards, but does not come into this back country. Mr. Nigel 
Kennedy, of White Cliffs, told me he counted as many as fifty in a flock on 
the Paroo River, in 1886, as they passed over his camp one evening.” 
Regarding the birds of Mallacoota, Victoria, Capt. S. A. White has 
recorded {Emu, Vol. XIV., p. 138, 1915) : “ Specimens secured were an 
adult male and female as well as a one-year-old bird, which proved to be a 
female. This bird, strange to say, had almost the plumage of the adult male, 
with the exception of a light sprinkling of yellow specks on the greater and 
lesser wing-coverts ; the band across the tail, instead of being vermilion, as 
in the adult male, had the external margin of the feathers light red, with 
irregular bars of black, half of the inner margins light red and the other half 
yellow, also crossed by irregular black bars, with a narrow margin of yellow 
on each side ; under tail-coverts glossy black ; two centre tail-feathers and the 
tips of all the other feathers glossy black. The principal contents of the 
stomach were the seeds of casuarinas and banksias, with a few insect larvae.” 
Though South Australia has been included in the range of this species, 
the records appear to have been of birds from the Northern Territory, now 
separated from South Australia. Otherwise I have no recent notes of its 
occurrence in South Australia proper. 
Captain S. A. White does not mention it, but observes : “ We met with 
C. b. stellatus upon our memorable trip into the interior in 1913. We had 
ascended the dry bed of the Finke River for a considerable distance before 
they were met with, and from all information gathered from natives and 
otherwise it seems that these birds do not come south of the Goyder River. 
After reaching Idracowra we met with some large flocks of these birds ; they 
were like other members of the family, very wary and difficult to approach. 
Their cry was the same discordant screech, and they seemed to be procuring 
most of their food upon the ground, consisting of small dry seeds of creeping 
plants which had long been dead. In one or two localities we found that these 
birds had been eating the seeds of the desert oak {Casuarina decaisneana ).” 
Capt. S. A. White wrote {Trans. Roy. Soc. S.A. , Vol. XXXVHL, 
108 
