56 
NICHOLES, A Trip to Central Australia. [ j^Ty 1 
dwellers they ran with an amazing swiftness. At times they 
visited the garden at the station and cleaned it up entirely of 
young lettuce and cabbage, in fact, of anything green. In con¬ 
sequence the settlers find it difficult to grow any kind of flowers 
or vegetables on account of their depredations. 
Seated on the banks of the water-hole one sunny afternoon, 
waiting for the Galahs to come in, I saw a Whistling Eagle 
(Haliastur sphemirus ) take up a position on a horizontal bough 
over the water, and with telephoto lens secured a distant 
snapshot. The bird almost immediately flew away and gave 
chase to a Crow that had picked up a large bone left by the 
natives when watering their horses. The Crow dropped the 
bone into the water, and the eagle flew to an adjacent stump in 
the lagoon, where I again snapped it with the camera. I photo¬ 
graphed the bird a third time as it flew away. At all times of 
the day the high-pitched whistle of this handsome bird could be 
heard along the water front, but at no time did I see it attacking 
any of the other birds frequenting the lagoon. However, late 
one Sunday afternoon we heard the shrill whistling of this Eagle* 
often repeated and saw two of these birds in the air, one chasing 
the other. A third then appeared. The pursuing bird of the 
first pair darted at its mate (?), which dropped something that 
the third bird caught in its claws before it had fallen six feet. 
It then flew away and perched in a Coolibah alongside the 
creek, followed by three Crows. “Jack," our boy, ran into the 
house for the binoculars, and we watched the Eagle plucking the 
feathers out of a black and white bird, the Crows all the while 
keeping up a supplicant “caw caw” and waiting for any tit-bits 
to drop. Upon walking round to the end of the lagoon we picked 
up some of the feathers of a Mudlark from under the tree, in 
which the Eagle was still feeding. In the branches above three 
Galahs perched serenely unconscious of the other bird’s fate. 
We came across the first Crested “Whistling” Pigeons 
(Ocyphaps lophotcs) at Four Mile Creek, just outside Munger- 
anie. They frequented the dry water-courses and sand-hills of 
the interior, but were never found more than five miles from 
water. All the apparently sterile hill-sides and plains of this 
part of South Central Australia hold much seed upon which 
Galahs and Pigeons and other seed-eating forms fed. The seed 
was so thickly scattered that when the rains came the desert 
blossomed like the rose, and we found all our specimens fat and 
in good condition. When flying the wings of this Pigeon made 
a peculiar noise similar to the metallic sound produced by the 
rusty hinges of a gate. They were locally called “whistling” 
Pigeons. Their tracks and those of other birds as well as those 
of marsupials and lizards were to be seen all over the sandhills 
and in the sandy beds of the creeks, making the countryside a 
veritable land of footprints. Along the Diamentina we saw fifty 
of these birds in a Coolibah tree, from whence they flew singly 
