XL 

 THE MAD BABBLER 



THE seven sisters (Crateroptis canorus), which 

 occur in every garden in India, are veritable 

 Punchinellos, so much so that schoolboys 

 in the Punjab always call them " mad 

 birds." But nature is not content with having pro- 

 duced these. So readily does the babbler clan lend 

 itself to the humoresque, that from it has been evolved 

 the large grey babbler {Argya malcomi), a species even 

 more comic than the noisy sisterhood. This is the 

 Verri chinda, the mad babbler of the Telugu-speaking 

 people. Pull the tail out of one of the seven sisters, 

 and insert in its place another, half as long again, with 

 the outer feathers of conspicuously lighter hue than 

 the median ones, then brush up the plumage of the 

 converted sister, and you will have effected a trans- 

 mutation of species, turned a jungle babbler into 

 a large grey one. This latter species has a wide range, 

 but is capricious in its distribution. It does not, I 

 believe, occur in the neighbourhood of the city of 

 Madras, but is abundant in some parts of South India. 

 The habits of this species seem to vary with the 

 locahty. In the south it appears to shun the madding 



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