Practical Bird-Keeping. — II. The British Warblers. 137


them in the warm aviary where they recovered, but the rest

died. The fact was I had turned them into liot-house flowers

and at the first breath of our chilly May weather they simply

withered away.


Nevertheless, for wintering delicate foreigners and for

singing birds I find this little house invaluable and I think it

quite likely that, if these Warblers had been cooled off gradually,

they would have turned out much better.


On the whole, I think the best system for small migrants

is that which I have described as “ some-heat,” although this

practically means that most of my birds spend much of the day

in the heated house and roost at night in a bush in the open. I

hang up brushwood close to the roof in the house and let them

take their choice. Some roost in and some roost out: probably

every bird knows what suits its constitution best. At all events

after an extensive trial I find the system answers well.


One word as to management. One constantly sees advice

given to beginners to keep insectivorous birds in separate aviaries.

I regard this advice as quite mistaken. It seems to me that the

more soft-bills are mixed up with hard-bills and distributed

amongst the different aviaries the better : by this method we get

less fighting and whatever food supplies the aviaries afford in the

form of live insects is fully taken advantage of.


Feeding.


There is probably no subject 011 which aviculturists differ

more than that of the feeding of insectivorous birds. This alone

shows that we have not yet devised a good system of feeding,

because, if there were such a system, everyone would adopt it.

As a matter of fact I do not believe that more can be done with

insectivorous birds to-day than was done a couple of centuries

ago. In the first avicultural article I ever wrote (I think it

appeared in the Zoologist in 1SS7) I showed that the Swallow

was successfully kept in a cage through a whole winter more

than one hundred years ago, and I gave instances of the suc¬

cessful domestication of the Marlin and Swift. Yet when, years

later, a Swallow appeared on the show-bench, everyone thought

it a marvel ! Until some genius introduces us to a wholesome,

nutritious insect, which can be propagated cheaply and in quati-



