20S 



importer, who did not know, and did not care, how to 

 feed them. I should have little fear of losing a 

 Crested Tit, however, if I could obtain a Scotch- 

 caught specimen. It is not so strictly insectivorous 

 as the Long-tailed Tit, and should, therefore, be some 

 degrees easier to keep in captivity. 



The handsomest of all the British Tits is the 

 Bearded Tit {^Panurus biarjuiais, Linn.) and this bird 

 is at the same time quite the easiest to keep in health 

 in captivit3\ In freedom they live for a part of the 

 year on the seeds of the reeds among which they find 

 their habitation, and their capacity for digesting these 

 renders it a comparatively easy matter to keep them 

 in captivity. A pair of Bearded Tits in a roomy cage 

 furnish as pretty an ornament to a room as could be 

 afforded, even by any of the more gorgeously plumaged 

 foreign birds ; but it is in an aviary that these beauti- 

 ful birds are seen to the best advantage. I have 

 alw^ays kept mine in a large aviar}' amongst a mixed 

 collection of British and foreign birds, and have never 

 had occasion to devote special trouble to them. They 

 would come at any time to my hand for a mealworm 

 while I stood inside the aviary, but their cleverness in 

 darting behind any obstacle which offered itself made 

 them difficult of capture with a net when I wished to 

 cage one for exhibition. As they are shown, of course, 

 in the British classes, it was only necessary to catch 

 one bird, and the interchange of ' ping-ping' between 

 the captive and his mate left behind in the aviary 

 were continuous until he was removed from the bird- 

 room. 



The peculiar gracefulness of the Bearded Tit is 

 well shown in the illustration published in the 

 September issue of the Magazine, but no black and 

 white drawing could, of course, even suggest the 

 beautiful gradations of color, ranging from a rufous 

 brown to a huffish white, possessed by the living bird. 



