i8i 



tissues of the foot through the broken skin ; a scab of 

 caked excrement forms on the toe ; and there we have 

 all the conditions necessary to produce the redness and 

 swelling known as gout. 



If the bird is a soft bill this is still more likely to 

 occur. Owing to his food being usually moist, and often 

 — in popular language — on the verge of decomposition, 

 his excreta are more profuse and considerably more 

 sloppy than those of a finch, and the skin of his feet 

 therefore tends to become soft and prone to excoria- 

 tion. And when we remember that his food contains 

 a considerable amount of animal substances, and that 

 under the advice of those to whom birdkeepers look 

 for guidance it is largely composed of Qgg — with its 

 known property of intensifj'ing the virulence of 

 bacteria — we then recognize that his ordure is much 

 more septic than that of the hard bill, and we can 

 therefore hardly be surprised at the special prevalence 

 of the so-called gout among birds of his kind. 



The following case well illustrates the above 

 remarks. A member of the Foreign Bird Club wrote 

 to me in 1904 asking my advice in respect of a Night- 

 ingale and a Yellow Wagtail which had swollen feet, 

 and saying znier alia that on advice which he had 

 sought from certain sources he had stopped giving 

 them mealworms, without however any improvement 

 of the birds' condition. Feeling that it was impossible 

 to honestly treat these birds without knowing what 

 was really the matter with them, I asked him to send 

 me one of the birds in the cage in which it lived, 

 a7id without any of the fittings or arrangements being 

 altered in the slightest degree. And this is what I 

 received. A box cage of fair size, with the food and 

 water both inside, and furnished with three smooth, 

 flattened perches rather more than half an inch in 

 width, the two end ones being so placed as to make it 

 quite easy for the bird to soil the food and water. 



