J 



ii6 



Bu&Gcrigar6. 



By E. HOPKINSON, D.S.O., M.B. 



OR the last ten years these birds have been 

 breeding more or less freely in my aviary at 

 Brighton, and as since 1894 I have kept a 

 fairly complete record of their numbers and 

 progen3% I have drawn up a genealogical tree, and a 

 pedigree of one of the youngest birds, hoping that 

 these records will be of some interest to others 

 besides myself. I have not been able to trace the 

 descent of all the birds enumerated on Table i, for 

 now that there are generally a dozen or more in the 

 aviary I can only be certain about those birds which 

 have been marked by leg-rings. For this purpose I 

 use ordinary "eyes" (hook-and-eye), and find them 

 much more satisfactory than the strips of aluminium 

 I used at first, which were easily pecked off b}^ the 

 birds unless fixed so tightly as to be likely to cause 

 injury. I use both black and white rings, and find 

 that with these two colours, the two legs, and the two 

 sexes, I get a sufficient number of different combi- 

 nations to mark satisfactorily up to 10 or 12 birds. 

 The great advantage of these " eyes " is the ease with 

 which they can be fixed, and their safety — they can 

 be nipped on quite loosely without slipping off, while 

 so far, at any rate, I have never seen any injury 

 attributable to their use. 



The Budgerigars share an outdoor aviary (16 feet 

 by 6 feet) with other British and foreign seedeaters, 

 but these parrakeets take no notice of their fellows — 

 seeming to live a life apart, untroubled by, and rarely 

 troubling, other birds, and going to nest regularly, 

 undisturbed by the crowds around them. Of late 

 there has been indeed a crowd, 200 odd a year ago, 

 and now, when they are nesting more freely than they 

 have ever done before, there are well over a hundred 

 other birds with them, varying in size from a Zebra 



