keminiscences. 201 



Hence these aviaries, which were reahy excellently constructed, 

 never pleased me, and much less the birds. Another point, and 

 that is the ventilation was always bad. But such is the 

 endurance of birds that many did exist for quite a while, even 

 here. 



Bad as it was in this particular, it became hopelessly so 

 when yoit wanted to drive in the birds in severe weather or in 

 order to catch them up. Now, it is an indisputable fact that 

 when birds are driven they invariably either hide in the bushes 

 or fly straight to the top of the flight and as far away from their 

 l)ursuer as possible. The consequence was that the majority 

 of the birds always flew on to the wire work marked XY, and one 

 tried to drive them in until the weariness of the flesh took hold 

 of one. In other words, driving in the birds proved a hopeless 

 proposition. The only way to catch them was to keep them 

 sliort of food, then put food in the shelters, and when the birds 

 went in let the window drop. Once in they were driven from 

 one shelter to another through a kind of tunnel comnmnication, 

 and there shut in. In that way one laboriously caught the 

 birds. In fact one had to become an amateur trapper. This 

 is not an overdrawn picture emanating from a disordered 

 imagination, but a hard fact which drove one to desperation 

 more than once w-hen I wanted to catch the birds. To those who 

 contemplate building an aviary, let the diagram, shown on the 

 next page, suggest the aim and object. 



The door A is to allow the birds to go in and out of the 

 shelter and should be at one top corner. With such an aviary, 

 driving birds in is a matter of seconds and certainty. The 

 diagrams are not meant to be to scale or even in proportion. 

 I should be sorry to construct such a shelter, for instance, but 

 I trust it will convey my meaning. 



Apart from these obvious and hopeless defects the 

 shelters had good points. To each flight there were two 

 shelters with a service passage between them. By a simple 

 overhead wire-work tunnel one could have either two entirely 

 separate flights, or by letting down a sliding door at one end 

 of the tunnel let the birds fly from one flight to the other. In 

 this way one could always keep a hopeless bully by himself, or 



