146 The Rose-Colourkd vStarlixg 



bearable ; but, to see Starlings to perfection, they should be kept in a good-sized 

 aviary. 



I have frequently seen Pastor roscns offered for sale, but was not sufficiently 

 struck with the bird to give the price required for it. Herr Wiener, however, 

 observes (Cassell's Cage-birds, p. 424) : — " I doubted the accounts I had read of 

 Starlings waging a war of extermination against locusts and grasshoppers ; till 

 seeing one day a Rose-coloured Pastor offered for sale, I remembered that I had 

 a hot-pit over-run with crickets, and resolved to try an experiment. The Pastor 

 was placed in an aviary, and I proceeded to catch crickets by placing balls of 

 crumpled brown paper into the warmest corners of the pit. Hundreds of livel}^ 

 crickets could be shaken out of the papers in the morning, and I could thus 

 produce at pleasure something like a swarm of grasshoppers. A well-bred terrier 

 will face any number of his natural enemies — rats ; but his zeal is nothing com- 

 pared to the Pastor's powers of methodical destruction of grasshoppers and crickets. 

 The crickets covered the ground on which the bird stood: they ran iip his legs 

 and over his body, and coolly would he peck away, devouring one after the other, 

 until none were left. Whei^e he put all the insects seemed incomprehensible ; 

 but the immense services which such insectivorous birds, with endless appetites, 

 can render to the agriculturist are palpable." 



In confinement this species should be fed like the Common Starling upon 

 the usual soft food, with the addition of such fruit as happens to be in season, 

 and any insects which can be obtained. Doubtless, like S/iinius vult^aris, it would 

 be all the better if allowed to have access to a saucer of seed: the fact that the 

 bird is a perfect scourge in the Indian fields of white millet being a sufficient 

 answer to those aviculturists who assert that seed is an nnnatural food for insect- 

 ivorous birds. 



