Also known as the Rose-breasted Cockatoo, Galahs are distributed generally throughout Australia. While they can cause damage to cultivated crops they also eat large quantities of seeds of noxious plants.

Galahs congregate in large noisy flocks, feeding mostly on the ground on seeds. Agricultural lands which provide large quantities of spilled seed at harvest time are targeted by Galahs. The birds mate permanently and nest in hollows in trees. Today, there is a high chick mortality rate, but evidence of strong population growth due to the greater availability of water and food resources since white settlement. It is likely Galahs would have been found in large numbers during the era of the Foundation of South Australia 1800-1851.

Distinguished British zoologist and ornithologist John Gould and his wife Elizabeth (nee Coxon), also an accomplished naturalist and illustrator voyaged with their children to Australia in 1838 on the Parsee (ship), landing in Tasmania. Gould visited New South Wales, spent several weeks exploring the Murray scrubs in South Australia, mainly in the company of Charles Sturt, and also visited Kangaroo Island. Adelaide did not impress him: it was then (1839) merely 'a chaotic jumble of sheds and mud huts'. Returning to Hobart, he went to New South Wales with his wife and two children, another son having been born in the meantime. The Gould party left Sydney on 9 April 1840, and publication of The Birds of Australia began in London on 1 December 1840. The final parts, making a total of thirty-six, appeared in 1848. They were bound in seven volumes and the cost to subscribers was 115 (A. H. Chisholm, 'Gould, John (1804 - 1881)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 1, Melbourne University Press, 1966, pp 465-467).

For an account of birdlife in South Australia in 1842, see letter to H. Tomlin from George P. Ingram.

Gould, John, 1804-1881