GLOSSY COCKATOO. 
and certainly there was no record of the egg being previously found in this 
state. This being the first record for the state, it is of interest to know where 
the skins are. The male is in the Adelaide Museum, the female now in the 
collection of Gregory M. Mathews, at Fair Oak, Hampshire, and the egg on 
loan from myself in the Adelaide Museum. 
“ A few years a pair probably of this species nested at Naracoort in the 
south-east : my friends who tried to rear the young were unsuccessful. 
Mrs. Coleman tells me that about seventy years ago, when she was a girl, that 
cockatoos with red tail-feathers used to come to Echunga in the Adelaide 
Hills to eat Wattle seed ( Acacia pycnantha). They have not been heard of 
in that locality for a great many years.” 
Captain S. A. White has written me : “ This bird was quite numerous 
in the seventies of the last century in the southern portion of the Mt. Lofty 
Ranges, for my father, the late Samuel White, had many skins in his collection 
taken in the Mt. Lofty Ranges. I saw it myself at the Black Swamps in 
1885. Many of the old settlers have told me that the Red- tailed Black 
Cockatoos were very plentiful in the Ranges south of Adelaide in the early 
days of the Colony. I feel sure there are none left to-day. There are very 
few on Kangaroo Island and those that are left are right up at the Western 
End.” 
North, in the Austr. Mus. Spec. Cat., No. 1, Vol. III., gives some 
interesting notes about the nidification of the species, but I do not see any- 
thing concerning the general habits that need be here reproduced. 
Dr. Macgillivray, of Broken Hill, says this bird is found about Casterton 
and Balmoral in the Victorian border, near South Australia. 
The restricted range does not admit of subspecific differentiation, owing 
to the movements of the birds. I did separate the Kangaroo Island form, 
but I find that the characters relied upon were individual. With my present 
material I am compelled to reject all idea of subspecies, and I here quote 
North’s remarks on the subject : “ Leach’s Black Cockatoo is remarkable 
for individual variation in plumage, and, from the material now before me, 
especially in the females. Some adult females are sparingly dotted and spotted 
with yellow on the sides of the head and upper and under wing-coverts : the 
feathers of the abdomen have narrow, and the under tail-coverts broad, 
yellow cross-bars. Others have the feathers on the throat yellow, margined 
with orange : in some, this yellow colouring extends to portions of the head 
and hind-neck, and in one abnormally plumaged specimen has one of the 
quills entirely yellow and washed with orange on the central portion of the 
outer web, the others being parti-coloured yellow and black, while the apical 
portion of the outer web of one of the inner secondaries has a long wedge- 
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