oir practice if it
makes a mistake. You may believe this if you wish to. I don't. But it
certainly is a fact that a group of magpies will sing together very
sweetly and harmoniously.

One could not exhaust the list of Australian birds in even a big book.
But a few more call for mention. There is the emu, like an ostrich, but
with coarse wiry hair. The emu does damage on the sheep-runs by breaking
down the wire fences. (Some say the emu likes fencing wire as an article
of diet; but that is an exaggeration founded on the fact that, like all
great birds, it can and does eat nails, pebbles, and other hard
substances, which lodge in its gizzard and help it to digest its food.)
On account of its mischievous habit of breaking fences the emu is
hunted down, and is now fast dwindling. In Tasmania it is altogether
extinct. Another danger to its existence is that it lays a very handsome
egg of a dark green colour. These eggs are sought out for ornaments, and
the emu's nest, built in the grass of the plain (for the emu cannot fly
nor climb trees), is robbed wherever found.

The brush turkey of Australia is strange in that it does not take its
family duties at all seriously. The bird does not hatch out its eggs by
sitting on them, but builds a mound of decaying vegetation over the
eggs, and leaves them to come out with the sun's heat.

The brolga, or native companion, is a handsome Australian bird of the
crane family. It is of a pretty grey colour, with red bill and red legs.
The brolga has a taste for dancing; flocks of this bird may be seen
solemnly going through quadrilles and lancers--of their own
invention--on the plains.

Another strange Australian bird is called the bower-bird, because when a
bower-bird wishes to go courting he builds in the Bush a little
pavilion, and adorns it with all the gay, bright objects he can--bits of
rag or metal, feathers from other birds, coloured stones and flowers. In
this he sets himself to dancing until some lady bower-bird is attracted,
and they set up housekeeping together. The bower-bird is credited with
being responsible for the discovery of a couple of goldfields, the birds
having picked up nuggets for their bowers, these, discovered by
prospectors, telling that gold was near.

If the bower-bird wishes for wedding chimes to grace his picturesque
mating, another bird will be able to gratify the wish--the bell-bird
which haunts quiet, cool glens, and has a note like a bell, and yet mor