Foreign Birds at Large in England 



The most numerous foreign cage- bird of all, 

 next to the canary and collared dove, is probably 

 the budgerigar, or grass-parrakeet of Australia 

 {Melopsittacns undzilatus), so familiar as the 

 " fortune-telling bird " of our street sibyls. Thou- 

 sands of these are imported annually, and, as they 

 are easier to breed in an aviary than canaries, 

 so many are thus raised that the stock could be 

 easily kept up by this means alone. Not long 

 ago a gentleman determined to try to acclimatise 

 these beautiful and lively little birds in his park, 

 and turned out some scores of pairs. These bred 

 in the open, but ultimately all, old and young, 

 took their departure, never to return. Isolated 

 instances of budgerigars being seen at large are, 

 of course, common. A pair once lived for years 

 in a London square, and a bird-dealer told me 

 recently that he knew of one which haunted a 

 particular locality for a whole summer. 



A few years back I myself liberated in St. 

 James's Park a dozen specimens of that loveliest 

 of starlings, the rosy pastor [Pastor roseus) ; but, 

 with the exception of one which fell a victim to a 

 stone, and another, probably of this lot, observed 

 about a fortnight later twelve miles from London, 

 they all disappeared before long. Yet it is very 

 unlikely that they died, for the species is a par- 

 ticularly hardy one, eating anything, from grass 

 to flies, and often reaching our shores unaided, 



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