Word: kookaburra
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...State of Western Australia is a vast semidesert as big as Western Europe. Separating it from the rest of Australia are 800 miles of uninhabited country. Among the jack rabbits, kangaroos and kookaburra birds that laugh hysterically and swallow snakes, live half a million farmers who till the fertile belt so successfully that they produce more than one fourth of Australia's wheat. Western Australians have long looked sideways at the Commonwealth's densely populated states, at the Eastern manufacturers who profit from the Commonwealth's high tariff, at the public works paid for by Australia...
...time the belief was popular in Australia that the kookaburra was a mighty destroyer of snakes...
Demands for his protection brought forth numerous writers who pointed out that while kookaburra had been observed to seize a snake in his beak, fly with it to a great height and drop it,* there was no certainty the snake was a live one or that this was kooka's method of snakassination or that kooka was doing anything but playing...
TIME, April 6, p. 19 that-"The kookaburra . . . swallows snakes and laughs" would not therefore receive general acceptance in the land where the dawn is signalled Galli-Curci-like with an explosion of ringing notes, amid a quick fire of echoes, the world awakes with a bang; and though abrupt and startling the onset kooka rushes exultingly into a rifle shot pealing crescendo, terminating in high pitched demoniacal mockerj'. S. E. BUTLER...
...Kookaburra, or laughing jackass, is a sharp-beaked Australian kingfisher that kills and swallows snakes, laughs raucously...