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E. J. Boosey — Bourke’s Parrakeet



The shoulders are of a mauvish lavender blue, and the lower breast

is enlivened with a small pink sunset which is in harmony with the

pale evening blue which appears on the under wing-coverts, under tail-

coverts, thighs, and sides of the rump.


Bourke’s Parrakeet inhabits the interior of New South Wales and

the surrounding district of South Australia adjoining, also the interior

of West Australia. Their staple diet should consist of a mixture of

canary and white millet with oats and a very small proportion of hemp

seed. Millet spray is also much appreciated, but they are not great

green food eaters. They are not so very difficult to breed ; that is to

say, they lack the tiresome habit of some Browns and most Hooded,

of coming into breeding condition in the autumn—an impossible time

of year, when it is too late to allow them to nest.


Bourke’s, indeed, vere in the opposite direction, and usually show

signs of wanting to breed rather sooner than one would wish. The cock

becomes more than normally active and begins to feed his wife towards

the end of February, but one has to harden one’s heart, for if the eggs

were successfully laid without the hen succumbing to egg-binding it is

highly probable that the young brood would be killed by frosts in April.


The end of the third week in March, therefore, is the earliest they

should be given their nest-boxes. The average hen Bourke’s is a very

fussy little bird about her nest, and if the box itself or the position in

which it is hung is not exactly to her liking her method of showing her

disapproval is very different to that of other hen Parrakeets—

particularly Broadtails. A hen Broadtail who considers the box

provided for her unworthy of the family her fond owner hopes she will

rear in it always follows the same programme : the box is put in and

this is usually the sign for a lot of excited tail-wagging on the part of

the cock (fathers being notoriously bad judges of the suitability or

otherwise of a nursery for their offspring), while the hen—more

cautious—is eventually persuaded gingerly to enter the dark aperture,

after the cock has made tolerably certain that no snakes or other

dangerous vermin lurk within. As soon as she had disappeared there

follows further tail-wagging and much anxious peering down the hole

on the part of the cock. If his wife likes the box provided, she will be

observed to spend longer and longer periods inside it, biting about and



