The truth about kookaburras

This began when my mate Luke sent me a link to a laughing bird, asking if it was a kookaburra. I’m not a birder, but it was pretty obvious what this was, so I said yes. Then I added:

These two had just finished a long call on a
street light on the same level as my upper deck

You rarely get a single kookaburra calling, but they do so in small gangs, often from several sites at once. I'm not sure if the calling is from one gang staking a claim, or two gangs "beating the bounds". One of my incomplete studies is on introduced species in Australia, and colonists blamed the kookaburras for killing snakes, and exported them to the island colony of Tasmania and to Western Australia.

The research is all done: I might just do that this afternoon. One surprise: it took us 80+ years to stop calling them "laughing jackasses".

So here’s the lowdown on what my granddaughters call “kookas”.

The white invaders first noticed one of these birds in April 1788, when surgeon John White travelled with the governor, several officers, three soldiers and two seamen, to Manly Cove, not far from where I live. They headed north, their path was blocked by swamps and thick bush, probably where Manly Golf Club is now.

Going along the coast they went north to a “small salt-water lagoon, about two miles [3 km] away”, where they saw black swans. 

Black swans, Narrabeen Lake.

This sighting was probably on Curl Curl Lagoon, usually called Queenscliff Lagoon now. Then they saw a kookaburra which White correctly recognised as a kingfisher. But what did the Indigenous Australians call it? The earliest hint comes in 1829:

In the valley beneath on the other side is a large verandah cottage with dormer windows, and a row of Norfolk Island pines, each exactly tapering as if cut to resemble a pyramid and in front, is the little bay, called by the blacks Woolamoola. The aboriginal language is certainly beautiful and highly expressive, much, more so, we conceive, than an European tongue. Where did they get it? Gogaga is their name of the bird we call the Laughing Jackass, and Gogaga repeated quick is part of the chuckling notes, which distinguish that ludicrous forester. Here we have several public buildings close at hand. The Prisoners' Barracks, called by courtesy Hyde-Park Barracks, a neat brick building, in which are lodged and fed five and six hundred men, and in Macquarie's time double that number. [1]

George Bennett was for many years Sydney’s leading naturalist, and he encountered the bird in the 1830s:

19th century propaganda shot (NLA)

The natives at Yas called the bird ''Gogera,'' or ''Gogobera,'' probably from its peculiar note, which has some resemblance to the sound of the word. It is said that one seldom laughs without being accompanied by a second, forming a very harmonious duet.

This bird, from its devouring mice and venomous reptiles, deserves protection…A gentleman told me that he was perfectly aware of the birds destroying snakes, as he had often seen them carry the reptiles to a tree, and break their heads to pieces with their strong sharp beaks; he also said that he had known them destroy chickens…[2]

 

Two honey-eaters confronting a kookaburra
at dawn. The honey-eaters protect their chicks.

Around 1860, Bennett was calling it the “laughing kingfisher”. His ‘Mountain Pheasant’ is what we now call a lyre-bird.

The Mountain Pheasant is a good mocking-bird, for it imitates the notes of the more pleasing songsters, as well as the loud gurgling laugh of the Dacelo, or Laughing Kingfisher. The elegant tail-feathers, detached in their complete form, are sought after by collectors, and are sold in the shops; the natives also use the feathers, as well as those of the Emeu, as ornaments in their hair. [3]

We might note here that the “kangaroo feathers” worn in the hats of the Australian light horse were, in fact emu feathers. The practice and term “kangaroo feathers” date back to the Boer War, but that’s another story, told elsewhere. [4] It was only some years later, around 1871, that we suddenly began calling our national bird a kookaburra. [5]

Around Australia, only a few local species were thought to be worth shifting. Snake-killing kookaburras were sent to both Tasmania and WA. The alien birds took the hollow trees used by other birds, and while kookaburras may have killed some snakes, they also preyed on small mammals and lizards. It seems that the idea of introducing kookaburras to Tasmania is older than people realise, going back at least to 1848:

SNAKE KILLERS.—Can you inform me, Sir, if there are any birds or animals in this country which have the habit of killing snakes. I suppose eagles may kill a few, but should think not many; besides them, I cannot think of anything else, and I should like if anybody could inform me whether the Sydney laughing jackass would be likely to live in this colony, for they kill snakes commonly, and are very amusing.
—A COLONIST. [6]

The Launceston Examiner responded that there would be few more welcome visitors than “…the veritable laughing jackass, who is a universal favorite in the sister colony.” The paper hoped that some naturalist would take the matter up. All the same, it would take half a century, soon after kookaburras were introduced into Western Australia, going on this 1902 report:

By arrangement with Mr. D. Le Souef, director of the Melbourne Zoological Gardens, a shipment of 40 laughing jackasses has been obtained for introduction in Tasmania. Last year 50 of these useful reptile-destroyers were liberated in various parts of the island, with results so satisfactory that the “new importations are in great request, and applications have been sent in for a bird or two from so far afield as the Straits Islands. The curator of the City Park Gardens has charge of the birds, which it is proposed to sell at a cost calculated to defray expenses. [7]

Now back to the Western Australian introduction: in the 1860s, luminaries like Ferdinand von Mueller, George Bennett and Edward Wilson were collecting kookaburras for introduction into Britain, [8] but nothing seems to have come of this scheme. Then in 1897, with Western Australia oozing with gold wealth, a new plan emerged.

Mr W. E. Learoyd, was commissioned by the Acclimatisation Committee of Western Australia to proceed to the Eastern colonies to obtain a supply of oysters for laying down at Albany, and also some birds. He headed for Victoria, hoping to get birds, but a bird catcher there told him they were protected.

Checking with the chief clerk in the Colonial Secretary’s office, he learned that an Act of Parliament held the birds absolutely protected until 1899, and that a permit could not be given in the face of the Act. The helpful chief clerk suggested that he apply to the authorities in Sydney, where he could probably get 100 or 200 birds.

In the end, he got 40, 16 old ones and 24 young ones, but only three of the young ones survived. “On the other hand, the old ones carry well under the most trying circumstances”, Learoyd reported in 1897. [9]

In May 1898, the streamer Rockton delivered thirty kookaburras from Victoria to Fremantle, from there they were sent to settle in at the Zoological Gardens at South Perth. [10] Eighteen months later, they were doing well:

The committee intend introducing more of these interesting and useful birds, which not only relieve the monotony of the bush silence by their laughing note, but are also good friends to the agriculturist as they devour, besides snakes, numbers of noxious insects. [11]

In 1901, came a request to the citizens of Guildford that they stop shooting these “useful and interesting birds”. [12] In 1910, the West Australian offered a detailed report on the work of the Acclimatisation Committee in “correcting Western Australia’s deficiency”, a project which was praised.

A bit more about Bennett, though. In July 1860, he attended a council meeting in London of the Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals in the United Kingdom, where he was elected as a corresponding member. He then

… promised to present to the society a cage which he had invented for the transmission of birds across sea, and also to bring to the next council meeting some specimens of the "laughing jackass" in his possession. [13]

There is no trace of those British kookaburras today, but Bennett returned home, inspired and ready to work again in December. I’ll come back to Bennett some other time. He now rates of one of my slightly expired temporary obsessions, but I still have all the notes, and in lockdown time, they help the sanity.

It’s either that or the mad sheep. Yes, I'm back working on them.

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[1] The Sydney Monitor, 9/3/1829, 2,  https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/31761614

[2] George Bennett, Wanderings in New South Wales, vol. 1, London: Richard Bentley, 1834, 222.

[3] George Bennett, Gatherings of a Naturalist in Australasia, 179 – 80.

[4] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/writing/early-language.htm

[5] Ibid.

[6] Launceston Examiner, 2 February 1848, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/36253996

[7] The Advertiser (Adelaide), 10 December 1902, 6, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/4905467

[8] The Argus, 22 August 1860, 8, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5688402

[9] The West Australian (Perth), 7 January 1897, 2, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/3105197

[10] The West Australian (Perth), 6 May 1898, 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/3209194/762803

[11] The West Australian (Perth), 2 December 1899, 60, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/33185281

[12] The West Australian (Perth), 23 August 1901, 4, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/24757708

[13] 'Society for the Acclimatisation of Animals &c.', The Argus, Tuesday 9 October 1860, p. 5, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/5691233