1886-87.] Exhibition of a Wliite Sparrozv. 19 



TV.— EXHIBITION OF A WHITE SPARROW. 



By The SECRETARY. 



{Read Dec. 22, 1S8G.) 



The sparrow now exhibited was sent me by IMr John Cruick- 

 shauk, Aberdeen, that I might bring it under the notice of the 

 Society. In his accompanying letter he says, " He has been in 

 my possession since June 1878, eight years and a half. He 

 fell out of a nest, and could neither eat nor fly. I fed him till 

 he could do both, and let him out to fly away ; but he did not 

 do so, and was taken into the house again. I had several 

 canaries, and he seemed to prefer their company to being free : 

 indeed he was free enough, for he was allowed to fly about, but 

 he never would leave the canaries. He ate nothing but canary- 

 seed and anything the canaries got to eat. He was quite of 

 the colours of a common sparrow till the first moulting of his 

 feathers, which was in 1879, and they then came in as you see 

 them, and have always come in the same year by year till the 

 present, when he has not had strength to cast them, and death 

 has been the result. I thought last year he would hardly have 

 come through the casting ; but he did, and got as lively as be- 

 fore. I attribute the white feathers to the domestication and 

 the food he lived on. He was clean and tidy in all his ways, 

 bathing every day like the canaries. In his earlier years he 

 picked up some turns of their song, and performed very agree- 

 ably. He was gentle, even timid in his ways, and if any dif- 

 ference arose the canaries easily mastered him. If any thing or 

 person that was strange appeared, he made for his cage at once ; 

 indeed he never lost sight of it, and when it was removed to be 

 cleaned he invariably followed it : no open window presented 

 any inducement to him to lose sight of it." The sparrow is 

 not a very pure albino, being not nearly so white as some which 

 are occasionally seen in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, but 

 is interesting from the fact of its changing the colour of its 

 plumage after the first moult. 



