Laughing Bird.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20233, 17 February 1934, Page 8

Laughing Bird.

Nature Notes

By

James Drummond,

F.L.S., F.Z.S.

PICTURE of a young kookaburra which visited a Lin wood garden recently appears on page 9 of to-day’s “ Star.” The occupier, seeing it sitting on a clothes-line, set a trap for it and caught it, and finds it an interesting pet. Evidently accustomed to captivity, it seems content with its fate, eating readily the meat, insects and bread served up to it. This is characteristic of kookaburras, tame and friendly birds, which usually like to be handled and petted.

It wears a bluish-black coat, and still has some downy feathers. Its voice is a throaty squawk. The tail sometimes is spread like a small fan. The most conspicuous feature of its structure is the bill. This teems to be malformed, or to have been injured. The point of the bayonet-like upper mandible has been broken and blunted. That mandible curves upwards. The lower mandible is about half as long as the upper one, instead of the same length. The defect does not interfere with its meals. The stranger has a well-nourished and robust appearance. It has to lie on its right side when eating. This visitor to Linwood probably escaped from - a cage. Kookaburras, the best known birds of Australia, have been introduced into New Zealand to help to check insect pests and the small birds. None survived except members of a consignment liberated on Kawau Island, Hauraki Gulf, by Sir George Grey about sixty-six years ago. Their progeny crossed to the mainland, and the famous laugh that causes kookaburras to be called laughing jackasses may be heard in coastal districts opposite Kawau, as well as on Sir George Grey’s old island home.

An Australian author, who believes that the wildest human laugh cannot rival for strangeness a kookaburra’s extraordinary outburst, wrote: “It is heard at its best at dawn, when the kookaburra wakes up to aetivity, and towards the evening, when several of them sit together on a branch and bid farewell to the sun. The bush then resounds with ha-ha, huh-huh, ho-ho, ha, huh, in a deafening chorus of wild spirits. The chorus ceases when the sun disappears.”