CASHEW-BIRD. .^33 



with much relish and discrimination. I was in- 

 formed that in a wild state, he sometimes eats the 

 sour-sop ; as I had none of this fruit at hand, I gave 

 him pieces of a ripe custard-apple and of a guava. 

 He immediately began to eat of each, plucking off 

 portions of the pulp, and also taking up the fleshy 

 ovaria of which the former is composed, which he 

 chewed with his beak till the enclosed seed was 

 pressed out. But all these were forsaken so soon as 

 I presented to him bunches of ripe pimento, black 

 and sweet. These he picked off" greedily, masticat- 

 ing each in the beak, until the seeds, which I 

 suppose, were too hotly aromatic for his taste, fell 

 out. It was amusing to see the persevering eflbrts 

 he made to obtain those berries, which happened to 

 be a little beyond his reach. He would jump from 

 perch to perch impatiently, gazing with outstretched 

 neck at the tempting fruit, then jump, and look 

 again ; then reach forward to them, until in the 

 endeavour, he would overbalance himself, and per- 

 form an involuntary somerset. Nothing daunted, 

 however, he persevered until he ventured to do, 

 what he had been several times on tiptoe to do, leap 

 on the bunch itself; and this he continued to do, 

 though with some failures, holding on in a scram- 

 bling way, now by a leaf, now by the berries them- 

 selves, until he had rifled the bunch of the ripest. 



After I had kept him about a week, during which 

 his liveliness and good temper had much attached 

 him to me, though he made not the slightest effort 

 at song, I took him out to cleanse the feathers of 

 his breast from the dried blood that had flowed from 



