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pleasing.* He is much more talkative than the female, and is

the first to commence the conversation or sound the alarm.


For a long time after their arrival, my birds seemed to be

totally unacquainted with the not unusual accomplishment

amongst birds of drinking cold water for the purpose of quench¬

ing thirst. Nevertheless the sight and sound of running water

have always more or less excited them. Knowing that some

non-drinking birds obtain a certain amount of moisture by eating

fruit or green-stuff, I offered these to the Bee-eaters, but mostly

with negative results. All ordinary green-stuff has, so far, been

refused, but I have scored a partial success with grapes cut up

into small pieces. For a little while, both more or less accepted

them when offered by hand ; but before long the female refused

them, and has continued to do so ever since. The male, on the

contrary, has regularly taken to them ; they are associated in his

mind with water ; and when I pour water, or even paraffin into

the stoves, they both become excited, the male for grapes, the

female for water. The water dish on the floor of their cage they

never touched, but I have an open glass receptacle suspended

close to one of their favourite perches. With a small house

water-can, I slowly pour the water from a little height

into the glass, emptying the latter and repeating the

operation as often as time and patience will allow. The

female seizes the mouth of the can and endeavours to

swallow it. A certain amount of water gets on to her face,

and then she flutters her feathers after the manner of a bird

washing, and bangs her bill again and again with such violence

that one wonders which will break first, the bill or the perch.

On November 14, for the first time, she touched the water in the

glass with the tip of her bill, as if about to wash, but nothing

came of it. Although she regularly came to the can as

described, once or twice a day, it was not until January 2 that

she sivalloiued a drop of water. O11 February 22, for the second



(*). It was on March 31st, a comparatively warm day, that I first heard the ‘•song”

of my Bee-eater. He was on a high perch, facing towards his mate, who was a little below

him, and was slowly waving his extended wings, and swaying his body to and fro like a

Scutari Howling Dervish, as he warbled forth liis whistling lay. It was little more than a

varied and sustained rippling whistle, with runs and quavers, and was distinctly pleasing.

It reminded me of a person singinga song with really a good but untrained and uncultivated

voice. When one remembers how often the song of the hand-reared Nightingale is a

failure, one must not be too hard on the first efforts of a bird who has never seen or heard

one of his own kind (save his wife) since the day when, as we suppose, he was taken from

his parents’ nest-hole in the banks of the Danube. Regularly since, he has occasionally

broken out with snatches of song as, with waving pinions extending and contracting, he

goes for Mrs. B , and pursues her with open mouth and un-lover-like snarls as she

continuously avoids his clumsy bucolical advances.—R. P.



