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"You've learnt your gun drill," he said, "learned it like a sulphur-crested cockatoo learns to gabble 'Pretty Polly scratch a poll'; why in the name of Moses you can't make your hands do what your tongue says 'as me beat. You, Donovan, that's Number Three, let me hear you repeat the drill for Action Front."
Sunny blue reflected, with the gaunt old trees, in the tiny gleaming seas among the lilies, while everywhere upon the floating leaves myriads and myriads of grey and pink "gallah" parrots and sulphur-crested cockatoos preened feathers, or rested, sipping at the water grey and pink verging to heliotrope and snowy white, touched here and there with gold, blending, flower-like, with the golden-flecked glory of the lilies.
All birds and manner of birds, and butterflies and bees and beetles, which have regard for colour and sweetness come hither to feast. Sulphur-crested cockatoos sail down upon the red raiment of the tree, and tear from it shreds until all the grass is ruddy with refuse, and their snowy breasts stained as though their feast was of blood instead of colourless nectar.
The only way of getting at him is to proceed cautiously from bush to bush; but even then, so shy a bird is he, that it is very difficult to bag him. There is a flock of great white sulphur-crested cockatoos clustered up in a high tree. Can we get a shot? They seem to anticipate our design, for on the moment they rise and wheel overhead with elevated crests, uttering their shrill hoarse cries.
Of course it would be impossible to detect any certain note of remonstrance, for the smaller birds are generally commenting on something or other in acidulous tones. Another occupant of this nestful tree is the sulphur-crested cockatoo, whose eggs are laid deep down in a hollow. How feeble and ludicrous are the voices of the fierce hawks and eagles.
Late in the afternoon the corroboree began, many of the participators having spent hours in the assumption of the festive costume of the down of sulphur-crested cockatoos plastered to the skin with grease and the blood. It is not to be supposed that white down in the hands of experienced dressers is incapable of variation in style. Several original designs excited the approbation of spectators.
Occasionally a sulphur-crested cockatoo comes sailing down to the diminishing pool through interwoven leafage noiselessly as a butterfly; but scrub fowls, scared by the apparition in white, scamper off with a clatter, scattering the dead leaves. In such narrow quarters, birds are under restraint, and show anxiety and apprehension. There is no sport or play.
If all the sulphur-crested cockatoos, scrub turkeys, and scrub fowls scattered over an area of the mainland corresponding in extent with the feeding-ground of the nutmeg pigeons were massed each night in four or five communities, the numbers would seem startling; but because the poor pigeon, conspicuous and heedless, has the instinct or habit of association, it is argued that they outnumber all the other birds, that their legions are infinite, and that that fact is sufficient licence for the destruction of thousands during the breeding season.
The resonant whooping of a swamp pheasant, antiphonal to a bell-voiced, crimson-crowned fruit pigeon in a giant fig-tree, the screeches of a sulphur-crested cockatoo as it tumbled in the air, evading the swoops of a grey goshawk, materialised the peace and the conflicts of a scene upon which no man had made mark.
There would be plenty of eggs then, and in a few weeks squabs quiveringly, helplessly fat. It was a good tree, for it gave good tidings, and it centralised the shelter of the Isle. Its blooms were delightfully, dashingly red, and they lasted long that is, if the camp the soil rectified by sun and rain happened to be in residence, for then the sulphur-crested cockatoos would be scared.
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