on the breeding of the Little Bustard in 1915. 33


young ones for the first day or two under the shelter of the light,

and they were safely brooded there at night.


When the chicks were three days old I watched their parent

searching for food in the drenched grass, though the day was so wet

and cold that she did not seem to be very successful in finding

insects. When she picked a fly off the grass she ran off to where

she knew the chicks were hidden up, and they answered to her

clucking call and hurried up to take the insect from her bill.

Luckily the bird is very tame, and she took mealworms readily, to

feed to the young. On the fifth day both young birds picked up

chopped egg from the ground freely.


The next day the rain seemed so interminable that, though

the risk was considerable, I decided to have the three birds moved to

a shed with a dry earthen floor, where they soon settled down, and

before night the mother was brooding the chicks quite comfortably.


The young birds throve apace on a diet of mealworms,

gentles, barley and Spratt’s meal, chopped egg and lettuce, and by

July 22nd, when three weeks old, they were getting much more

independent of the mother, whom they almost exactly resembled

in plumage, the only difference that I could see being that, in the

young, the iris was a good deal paler than in the adult, and that there

was a well-defined buff streak down the centre of the crown of the

head; but on the feathers faded, this distinction became negligible.


When five weeks old the young appeared certainly more

than half grown.


As there is some uncertainty about the plumage of the

young male in its first year, whether it resembles the female, or

whether, from the first, the markings on the upper parts are finer

in the young male, I hoped the young might turn out to be a pair,

so that we might settle this point. One of the young was slightly

larger than the other, and seemed likely to be a male. However,

unfortunately there was soon an opportunity of settling the sex

of this bird, for somehow it hianaged to break one wing close to the

shoulder, too high up to amputate, and, gangrene setting in, the poor

little thing died on September 2nd. It proved on dissection to be a

female.


Now, when thirteen months old, the survivor resembles the


3



