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The shock gave me increased energy, and I reached the groom's change at 10.30 p.m. The coach arrived an hour later. We were all thoroughly done up, and had a supper of stewed galahs. The stage-keeper was without flour. When we arrived at Normanton we were in a sad plight from our rough experiences. The next day Bartholomew and myself were the only passengers on the coach for Croydon.
The tufted birds come to water just after daylight and just before sundown, and so are more easily shot than the bronzewing. Throughout the day, galahs, wee-jugglers, parakeets, diamond-sparrows, and an occasional hawk or crow, came to the spring, evidently a favourite resort.
Ernest Henry, and camped the sheep where the town of Hughenden now stands. We then had a long stage of fifteen miles to the bend of the river without water. The remainder of our trip down the river was uneventful. At Clifton, our destination, there was a fine water-hole two and a-half miles long, trees on the banks were crowded with cockatoos, corellas, with galahs in flocks on the plains.
This pool was a favourite resort for hundreds of birds crows, hawks, galahs, parakeets, pigeons and sparrows and numerous dingoes. Of the bronzewings, which at sundown and before sunrise lined the rocks literally in hundreds, we shot as many as we wanted. How thick they were can be judged from the result of one barrel, which killed fourteen.
"Why are the birds all perching together over there?" asked Dot, pointing to a branch of the dead tree, "since they all hate one another and want to get away. The Galahs have pecked the Butcher Bird twice in five minutes, the Pee-weet keeps quarrelling with the Soldier Bird, and none of them can bear the English Sparrow." "The Swallow says that's the jury," answered the Magpie.
For three days he lay in the recess of a sheltering rock near the pool, and we nursed him as best we could. Condensed milk and brandy, thin cornflour and chlorodyne, I doctored him with; he was a very obedient patient, whose pangs of hunger were aggravated by watching us feeding daily on bronzewings, wallabies, and galahs.
The galahs make the most fuss of any, chattering away on the trees, and sneaking down one by one, as if they hoped by their noise to cover the advance of their mate. The prettiest of all the birds is a little plump, quail-like rock-pigeon or spinifex-pigeon, a dear little shiny, brown fellow with a tuft on his head.
There was something in presenting an academic-cum-capitalistic appearance even to the sordid sheep, as they looked up from nibbling their cotton-bush stumps, and to the frivolous galahs, sweeping in a changeably-tinted cloud over the plain, or studding the trees of the pine-ridge like large pink and silver-grey blossoms, set off by the rich green of the foliage.
A popular drinking-place this, frequented by birds of all kinds, crows, hawks, pigeons, galahs, wee-jugglers, and the ubiquitous diamond-sparrows. During the night we could hear wallabies hopping along, but were too worn out to sit up to shoot them. Though our sufferings had not been great, we had had a "bit of a doing."
"Why are the birds all perching together over there?" asked Dot, pointing to a branch of the dead tree, "since they all hate one another and want to get away. The Galahs have pecked the Butcher Bird twice in five minutes, the Peeweet keeps quarrelling with the Soldier Bird, and none of them can bear the English Sparrow." "The Swallow says that's the jury," answered the Magpie.
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