Stray Notes



145



I beg humbly to apologize for the length of this address, and only hope

that it may enable you to take a fresh interest in any of this exotic

tribe, which you may see either alive or portrayed. Surely a feathered

race endowed with such singular powers, both of brain and voice, was

not created without purpose, but was intended for the delight and

sometimes for the solace of the human race.



STRAY NOTES


Mr. Walter Goodfellow, who is well known to members of the

Avicultural Society as a great traveller who has imported some of the

rarest of foreign birds in years gone by, has been spending the last

few years in managing a plantation in Bolivia, a most out-of-the-way

part of the world with a very bad climate. Although thoroughly used

to tropical climates, he has suffered much, though when I met him in

the Zoological Gardens the other day he seemed to have quite recovered.

He consoled himself for the lack of fellow white men by collecting

around him native beasts and birds, and brought a few home, some of

which I understand have gone to our member Mr. E. J. Brook. To the

Zoological Gardens he presented amongst other things a splendid

pair of small Macaws of a species never before seen in this country.

Ara aureicollis, the Yellow-collared Macaw, a species somewhat like

Illiger’s Macaw, but carrying on the nape a conspicuous collar of bright

yellow.


* ' * * *


Another great friend, and one of the best of aviculturists, who has

just returned home is Dr. E. Hopkinson, D.S.O., who, like Mr. Good-

fellow, would not be happy if he travelled home without some birds.

He brought from the Gambia a beautiful specimen of the White-eared

Scops Owl ( Scops leucotis), a lovely specimen of the African Roller

(Coracias ncevius), some Masked and Vinaceous Doves, and a great

rarity, never before imported, in the form of a specimen of the West

African Chat-Thrush ( Cossyplia atricapilla). He has generously

presented most of these to the Zoological Society, but the Cossi/])ha



