32



On the Zebra finch.



ever reared a family in their first year. I must have bred at least a

hundred of these little birds without the slightest trouble, the young

being sometimes reared upon dry seed alone : I tried them with soft

food containing egg and ants’ cocoons, but I came to the conclusion

that this was a mistake; as the parents, owing to the stimulating

food, flung their young out of the nest and started all over again :

finally I gave them crumbled Madeira cake alone, slightly damped,

as soft food, and this answered admirably.


From time to time I got rid of pairs of this species to avicul-

tural friends who needed them, but I always had so many that they

were the prevalent feature of the aviary and their aggressive behaviour

when building rather interfered with the nidification of other and

much more interesting small finches associated with them. There¬

fore when (about 1900) a friend gave me an ornamental all-wire

aviary, measuring about five feet by three and perhaps averaging six

to seven feet high ; in 1902 I turned into its central and largest

division twenty pairs of young Zebra-finches.


I imagined that this toy-aviary, which still stands on the

floor at one end of my conservatory, would suit the little birds quite

as well as the larger enclosure; but I discovered that, although they

seemed quite willing to breed, the hens gradually died off from egg¬

binding ; as a general rule such eggs as were deposited were not

hatched, and when they were, only one or two youngsters were

reared ; and even these proved constitutionally weak and died young.


By degrees the stock dwindled, the hens dying first and then

the cocks, until, at the end of three or four years, only three male

birds survived, and in course of time these followed suit, the last

expiring on the 23rd of October 1912. Before this time all my other

pairs had either been dispersed or had died, so that with the veteran

in the ornamental aviary my experience of Zebra-finches came to an

end.


Now although this species is evidently exceedingly hardy, I

came to the conclusion that it is naturally a short-lived bird and I

attributed this to the brevity of its period of incubation—eleven

days ; indeed I put the average duration of its natural life down as

about three years; and so, for one of mine to have lived for ten

years, I regard as unusual.



