[Illustration: [2] [3] [4] [6] [8] [11] [14] [16]] =2= Mallee-Fowl =3= Stubble Quail =4= Brown Quail =6= King Quail =8= Painted Quail =11= Plain Wanderer =14= Diamond Dove =16= Bronzewing Pigeon AN AUSTRALIAN BIRD BOOK A Pocket Book for Field Use BY J. A. LEACH, M.Sc. _First-class Honorman and University Exhibitioner and Scholar in Biology; Organizing Inspector of Nature Study, Education Department, Victoria; Member of the Council of the Royal Australasian Ornithologists' Union; Vice-President of the Field Naturalists' Club of Victoria; &c._ With Introduction by FRANK TATE, M.A., I.S.O. _Director of Education, Victoria._ _Published by arrangement with the Education Department of Victoria._ SECOND EDITION [Illustration] MELBOURNE Christchurch, Wellington, Dunedin, N.Z., and London. WHITCOMBE & TOMBS LIMITED 1912 [Illustration: _The Queen City Printers_] _Illustrations from Specimens (318) in the National Museum, Melbourne; the balance mostly from Specimens in the Entomological Museum, C. French (59), and in the collections of A. Coles, Taxidermist, (36), C. F. Cole, and D. Le Souëf. Twenty-two birds were photographed from Gould's "Birds of Australia," five from drawings specially prepared by C. C. Brittlebank, the well-known naturalist-artist, and one from the Report of the Horn Expedition._ _Photos by Ralph L. Miller._ _Engravings by Patterson Shugg & Co., from Paintings by Miss Ethel M. Paterson._ INTRODUCTION. Nature-study in our schools is fast producing a generation of Australians trained to look upon the characteristic beauties of our Australian skies, our trees, our flowers, our birds with a passionate appreciation almost unknown to our pioneering fathers and mothers. It was natural that newcomers from the Old World should have been impressed, and often unfavorably impressed, by the oddness of things here. Rural sights to them had hitherto been sights of trim meadows bordered by neat hedgerows, of well-cultivated fields and comfortable farmsteads, or of stately homes set in fair gardens and far-reaching parks of magnificently-spreading trees. What wonder, then, that they were at first almost repelled by the strangeness and unfamiliarity of their new surroundings! How could eyes accustomed to the decided greens and to the somewhat monotonous shapeliness of the trees in an English summer landscape find beauty all at once in the delicate, elusive tints of the gum trees, or in the wonderfully decorative lines of their scanty boughs and light foliage shown clear against a bright sky? And so a land which is eminently a land of color, where the ever-present eucalypts give in their leaves every shade from blue-grays to darkest greens; where the tender shoots show brilliantly in bright crimson, or duller russets, or bright coppery-gold; and where tall, slender stems change slowly through a harmony of salmon-pinks and pearl-grays, has been called a drab-colored land.