Mote Notes on the Ctoss bill.



203



When the sun set, he concealed himself most wonderfully on his

branch, as he objected to being caught and put in his cage to

roost. Alas ! one morning, Ziller was found lying in his cage in

great suffering, and, in spite of every effort to relieve him, he

died in my hand. He had pecked the rubber tubing of the

window as he sat on his bough, and this obviously was the cause

of his death. We still miss our little mountain friend with his

clever ways and sweet music.


The pair I have now are full of character, and enjoy their

liberty to a great extent, for the bay-window in which their aviary

■cage is, is open at the top all day and their cage-door is often open,

but they never fly away. Their cage is divided into an ‘orchard’

and a ‘fir-wood.’ The orchard has fresh earth thickly strewn in

it, with moss and leaves and tufts of grass and their bath, and

apple and nut boughs to perch on and pick to pieces. The fir-

wood has sand and gravel, small pine logs and chips and fir

branches. I give them hemp, fir-seed, canary and buckwheat,

fir cones and the cores of apples, for even when the cones are

•empty they like playing with them and picking them to pieces,

always dropping them into their water—either to soften the

cones or add turpentine to their bath ? When our Christmas tree

was dismantled in December last it was placed near their cage

for them to enjoy, and all day they played in it, and roosted in it

.at night. We have seen them in their own native haunts—the

mountain forests of Germany and Austria—playing among the

great spruce firs, where clusters of their favourite cones hang

ready for them to work at and pick out the fir seeds.


In Tyrol, and other mountainous districts of Austria, the

country people keep them in little cages and feed them on hemp

only, believing firmly that the Kreuzschnabel, or Krummschnabel,

keeps off illness; any infection being carried off from human

beings to himself—a belief probably based upon the legend of

the Crossbill. I have often been told in Tyrol that there are

two kinds of Kreuzschnabel, the greenish bird which is red when

young, and retains the mystic ruddy spots upon its breast for

some time ; and the yellow Crossbill, a larger bird.


I get my fir-seed (Tannen- or Fichten-samen) from Ger¬

many, as I cannot find any corn-dealer in England who sells it.



