0 ?i some Bahama Birds. 19


when T open the two-foot doors of their cage to attend to their

wants.


Their little rippling and twittering voices are incessantly

being uttered, now sometimes certainly by the male.


They are very sensitive to cold ; their delight, when the

sun shines into their cage, is unbounded.


The}'' seem to be wholly insectivorous.


I often wonder how it has fared with some other specimens

of this species which reached this country, along with my three

birds, on the 26th May last !



FIELD NOTES ON SOME BAHAMA BIRDS.


By J. Lewis Bonhote, M.A.


Part II.


In my last article I dealt with the birds inhabiting the

“ coppet ” or thick bush, and we will now turn to the tracts of

land locally known as Pine Barrens. These barrens are, as I

explained in my previous paper, extensive tracts of barren rock

on which grows a minimum of vegetation; but shooting up on

the rock in about two or three inches of soil, with their roots

stretching out horizontally in all directions, stand pine trees,

which reach a height of 40 or 50 feet. They are not very large,

seldom exceeding 15 inches in diameter, and are destitute of

foliage except at their summits where their branches join to form

a fairly dense covering. Here and there, amongst the trees, are

patches of bush, and over the rest of the ground long coarse

grass grows scantily, intermixed with a few palmettos. In this

region the birds are somewhat scattered and may mostly be found

round the clumps of bush : it must not, of course, be imagined

that the birds I am about to notice are strictly limited to the

barrens. Nature refuses to be ruled by laws as immutable as the

confines of an aviary and many of these birds are found in the

“ coppet ” and vice versa.


The commonest and perhaps the handsomest of all the

birds of the barrens is the Bahama Finch* (S. zena ) known



Spitidalis zena —Mus. Cat. Vol. XI., p. 169.



