Psittacus nasica, Russ. Synonyms: Psittacus nasicus, Plyctolophus tenuirostris, Cacatua nasica, Licmetis tenuirostris, Licmetis nasicus, etc.

German: Der Nasenkakadu.

Slender- Billed Cockatoo.

IT is certainly a bad plan to allow oneself to be prejudiced by another person against anything of which one has no personal knowledge, and this we admit to have been our case with regard to the Slender-billed Cockatoo, of which Mr. Gedney wrote: "I confess to a feeling of dislike towards these birds, which nothing can overcome, not that I object to long-nosed creatures as a rule, for nature has been somewhat liberal to me in the matter of nose: but these Cockatoos are morose and spiteful in disposition, querulous, excitable, and uneasy in their manners when kept as cage pets, and strongly addicted to shrieking at all seasons."

So strong was our prejudice against this Cockatoo, engendered solely by a perusal of the above quoted remarks, that for a long time we refused to believe that anything good could be said of or for it: but we were mistaken, as we shall presently make it appear: not that we doubt Mr. Gedney's account of the individuals of the species that chanced to come into his possession, but, as in our own experience with the Rosy Cockatoo, his birds were probably unfortunate specimens of their race, and by no means to be considered as typical thereof.

Like the Rosy one, the Slender-billed has very little real claim to be called a Cockatoo, for he has no crest to speak of, but as he also has the power to raise the short head feathers, he has been placed in that branch of the Parrot family, which the older naturalists distinguished by the generic name Plyctolophus; although as the reader of the list of synonyms placed at the head of this article will have doubtless noticed, these short-crested Cockatoos have been constituted a genus by themselves, and received the name of Licmetis from Wagler, Gray, and others; but to our notion Dr. Russ's plan of placing all the members of the Parrot family, whether Cockatoos, Lories, Parrakeets, or Parrots proper, in one genns, presents so many advantages to the student of ornithology, that it would be impertinent to enlarge upon it here: where all are designated by the one generic appellation of Psittacus, the veriest tyro in natural history will see at a glance to what family a Plyctolophus, Brotogenis, Licmetis, Triehoglossus, Macrocercus, Calyp-torynchus, Tanygnathus, Triclaria, and Paloeornis belongs; whereas under the old system the creatures so designated might, for all he could tell, be a kind of ostrich, humming-bird, or baboon even, instead of a variety of Parrot.

The general colour of this bird is white, but the forehead and face are reddish, a tinge of the same colour is apparent on the vent, and a patch of blue bare skin surrounds the eye; the beak is white, and the upper mandible extraordinarily prolonged, whence some of the creature's names, both English and scientific.

When in their wild state the Slender-billed Cockatoos, in addition to preying voraciously on the ripening crops of the farmer, feed on various kiuds of bulbous plants, the roots of which they dig with much expert-noss out of the hard sun-baked soil of Australia, and do not disdain a good fat wood-grub as an occasional relish, particularly during the brooding season.

Like all the rost of the Parrots they make no nest, but the female lays two or three white eggs on the soft wood of some hollow bough, and hatches them in about twenty-one days; there are usually two broods in the season, and the young do not attain their full growth until they are at least a year old.

The ordinary Slendor-billed Cockatoo is a native of southern and south-western and eastern Australia, but a kindred species, showing much more red in various parts of the plumage is found in the north, and was particularly common, according to the late John Gould, in the vicinity of Port Easington.

As a proof that hasty conclusions affecting an entire race should be cautiously drawn from observations embracing only a limited number of individuals belonging thereto, wo may here insert an account of a Slender-billed Cockatoo, which wo have recently received from a lady of our acquaintance; and if objection should be taken, and the remark made that thin favourable view of the character of the Slender-billed one is not more likely to be universally comet, than the unfavourable one with which we opened this paper, we reply that no doubt the truth lies between the two extremes, and that as another lady observed, when informed that the person with whom she was conversing was an Inahiuan, "Ah! well, there are good and bad in every country."

"By the way", writes the correspondent to whom we referred above, "neither you nor Mr. Gedney give the Slender-billed Cockatoo a good character, and yet my 'Toby', who is, I believe, a 'Nosey', is the dearest, funniest old fellow that ever lived! Only he does scream sometimes, when he is either offended, or frightened, but then he talks. When first I had him, he knew, I should think, about twenty sentences, and never misapplied them; now he has become a greater mimic than talker; daily he goes through the performance of pouring out tea. The sugar is first put into the cups - the action of putting it in, you understand - and then the tea is poured out; his beak being the spout of the tea-pot, and he makes the noise of pouring exactly, while pretending to do so. Yet no one is allowed to see all his funny little doings, but his own home party; because, like all estimable characters, Toby keeps the best for home. One morning, from an old ladder that is devoted to his use in the garden, he watched the gardener clipping the laurels, and when he came in, we had the whole performance of clipping laurels gone through exactly, giving his head a little jerk with each snap of the shears - his beak was of course supposed to be those implements - and the sound was exact. Is it not Lady Brassey who speaks of a Cockatoo of this sort in one of her books? a Cockatoo that imitated actions of all kinds, could sew, and had the toothache, or was supposed to have, putting up his 'hand', and rocking about, as he had seen his mistress doing, when suffering from that disagreeable complaint. I do not know whether it is general with all Cockatoos, but my Toby likes almost everything served up warm. He eats and drinks very nearly what we do, and it certainly seems to suit him, for no Cockatoo could be in better health."

To the latter part of the above extremely interesting account of a remarkable Cockatoo, we can but say that, to us, it seems injudicious to feed one of these birds as described, and that the mixed diet given to him without causing any deterioration in health, is due to the free life he leads in our friend's garden.

In a subsequent letter our correspondent, continuing her account of "Toby", says: "One of his cleverest tricks I did not mention, it is this: 'The children's hour' with us is Toby's hour, in which he is taken out of his cage and petted, and played with. The striking of a match to light the lamp is his signal for retiring. He has taken a fancy to doing this, and as soon as the match-box appears, he strikes his match, 'Click! fizz!' and up goes his head, with the exact imitation of the sound and action."

Really such a bird is quite a phenomenon, and we shall have, in future, much more respect for the abilities and capacity of the Slender-billed one than we used to have: but to generalize from particulars is bad logic, and, as we have already remarked in this connection, birds have their several idiosyncrasies as well as ourselves, and vary as much in their respective characters and dispositions as men do.

These birds have the recommendation of being extremely hardy, and care nothing for the inclemencies of our severest winters, roosting preferably out of doors, when in a garden aviary, to seeking the covered-in portion of their abode: in the matter of their diseases we are quite without experience, for we have never seen one of them ill, and believe that they are among the most enduring of their race.

In addition to the Port Essington Slender-bill, there is a larger bird of the same description that is a native of the Islands to the north of Australia; it is occasionally to be met with in captivity, but is very generally confounded with the species under consideration, from which it differs in no other respect than size. An individual of this variety, the divergence of type is not sufficient to constitute it a distinct species, that once came under our notice, seemed a very intelligent quiet old fellow: he had passed a good many years in captivity in a round Parrot-cage, and had probably out-lived his recollections of a free life in the woods and forests of his native isle, for often as we have been in his company, we never heard him scream, and his disposition, at all times, was the same, placid and apparently contented: he seemed to derive much pleasure and satisfaction from having his head scratched, and would remain under the operation as long as his visitor had the patience to rub, first one side, and then the other of his "poll." He was not much of a linguist, was "Cocky"; his own name, and the monosyllable "Well?" uttered interrogatively, was about the extent of his accomplishments in this direction: but his quietude and amiability, in spite of his ungainly appearance, for when all has been said and done, the Slender-billed Cockatoo is not a pretty bird, almost made us envy his owner his possession; for at that time our great pet, and first favourite, was a splendid Goffin, who was noisy and talkative to an extreme degree, and the contrast between the two was remarkable.

Goffin's beauty, however, more than counterbalanced his noisiness in our estimation, and the great Slender-billed one's ugliness could not be overlooked, even for the sake of his amiable docility. So true it is, that, in this world, appearance, if not exactly everything, goes a long way towards getting the fortunate possessor excused a number of not always minor faults.

During the breeding season the Slender-billed Cockatoos separate into pairs, making their home in the hollow branches of the loftiest gum-trees they can find; we remember once seeing several of them in the tree tops on the Plenty Ranges in Victoria, and - tell it not in Gath - firing at them, although it was the height of their breeding-season; but so tall were those eucalyptii, that our charge of large duck-shot did not even bring down a leaf, and of course the birds flew away to a short distance with a series of shrieks that sounded uncommonly like derisive laughter.

Had we known what age the young ones were we should, in spite of its diameter of nearly four feet, have cut down that forest giant that, in one of its hollow arms, held the dearest treasure of those Cockatoos; but we did not know: the young ones might be only just hatched, and it would be a pity to take them, for they would not live, or there might only be eggs, which would have been certain to have got broken in the fall, so we left the grand old tree standing, and we hope it yet rears its head towards heaven, o'ertopping all its fellows, as it did in those far-off times.

Ay de mi! we were young and careless then, but the weird beauty of those lonely sylvan scenes, peopled with "strange bright birds of purple wing," as some poet has it, vocal with the mimic chant of the Menura, the delusive tinkling of the bell-bird, the incessant demands of the bald-head, monk- or friar-bird to know the hour of the day: "what o'clock, what o'clock!" and at night resounding with the shrill screams of the phalanger, the hoarse-grunting squeak of the opossum, and the angry vociferations of the great night-jar for the restoration of the dainty morsel of which, according to a colonial tradition, he had been deprived by some vagrant Jew, "Ma Pork, Ma Pork", impresses itself upon our recollection with a vividness and intensity that no lapse of time, or distance has yet been able to efface or even to impair.

But we are forgetting our friend of the slender-bill, the dainty feeder on the choicest orchidaceous bulbs, no less than on the tender corn of the settler, who bears poor "nosey' even less good-will than he has won at the hands of the earliest writer on foreign cage-birds in this land of ours. Yes: he is fond of roots, and an adept at digging them out of the hard soil, for in Australia, tree orchids, that is orchids growing on trees, are the exception, and not the rule, as in Tropical America, the head-quarters of their race, and his long bill, that otherwise seems so disproportionate and out of place, stands him in good stead, both of pickaxe and shovel, and should he find, as no doubt he often does, a grub, or chrysalis of coleoptera or moth, he will be quite certain not to let it go a-begging. Nevertheless, in captivity, he will do very well without insect food, and, in point of fact, a very great deal better, because too succulent a diet is apt to arouse feelings and passions that are better left quiescent, unless a partner is presented to him, and it is wished that he should reproduce his kind, which, so far as we can learn, he has never yet done in captivity.

"N'e' veillez pas le chat qui dart": is a good old French proverb, which has its equivalent in our English saying "Let sleeping dogs lie," and we would commend both to the consideration of those of our readers who are possessed of pet Parrots, Macaws, or Cockatoos; never give your birds any stimulating food, you will excite them if you do, and finding no legitimate outcome for their feelings, they will, literally, turn to and rend themselves to pieces, plucking out every feather on their bodies they can reach, and leaving themselves as bare as Plato's "biped", of which we remember having read.