46 



specimens brought in, fresh caught, for sale, and have success- 

 fully " nieated them off," as bird-fauciers say, together with 

 the common bird. For it is easy to get adult rollers to feed in 

 confinement if 30U start them on cockroaches all — more or 

 less — alive and kicking. Water they do not constantly requre, 

 for they seldom appear to drink when they have the chance : 

 in this total abstinence again resembling the kingfishers but 

 unlike those birds they not only bathe, but wallow and shuffle 

 in dust like a fowl when the}' want a clean-up. 



It is curious that, being so easy to keep in confinement, 

 the Indian Roller has so seldom been sent to England. Some 

 time ago a well-known London fancier of birds obtained a very 

 fjeed\' specimen from a dealer, and more receuth' my friend Mr. 

 E. W. Harper, of this city, .succeeded in .sending one to the 

 I/Ondon Zoo., where it is still, in good health. The curious 

 thing was that, though tame enough in Calcutta, the bird 

 became, for a time, very wild and nervous in London. But the 

 ver}' intelligent keeper, who had it in charge, told me that he 

 had found the European Rollers, which he had had for some 

 time in his care, also verj' timid, and the same thing was noted 

 about this latter species {Coracias garrula) by Bechstein, in his 

 work on cage birds, more than a century ago ; so that possibly 

 the peculiarity runs in the family. The European Roller, 

 which also occurs in the extreme north-west of India, and 

 comes to England frequently to get shot and "recorded," is a 

 migratory species, with much more pale blue and less purple 

 in its plumage than our " Blue-Jay." Curiously enough, it is 

 sometimes called in German the " Birch-Jay," so that the 

 superficial resemblance to the ja\' has struck Europeans iude- 

 ])endently in two distinct countries. 



The Americans, however, do not seem to have been taken 

 in, being no doubt too well acquainted with their own Blue- 

 Ja}' {Cyanocitta cristaia), which really is, in a literal sense, 

 what its name proclaims it to be. There are no rollers in 

 America, and when Brother Jonathan gets over the unreason- 

 able horror of acclimatization with which his too successful 

 experiment with Philip Sparrow has filled him, he cannot do 

 better than set to work to supply the deficiency with a big 

 consignment of our lovely Indian species : for the roller would 

 not onl}' be a great ornament to the prairies, but a very useful 

 ally in grasshopper plagues. 



