262 LORD LILFORD 



best friends, but as long as women persist in 

 disfiguring themselves by wearing owls' heads 

 and wings as ornaments, and dealers will give a 

 price for these birds to make up into screens, for 

 which they find a ready sale, so long will the 

 idiotic destruction of owls continue. 



1 To revert to the collections at Lilford, we 

 have a large number of caged birds of many 

 different species, amongst which I may specially 

 mention, as sweet singers, a Blue Eock Thrush 

 that we took from the nest on the coast of 

 Sardinia nearly twelve years ago, and two of a 

 small dark race of Blackcap from Madeira that 

 have passed five winters at Lilford, and are both 

 singing in the room in which I am now writing. 



' I must not forget the very beautiful Indian 

 birds commonly known as " Shama," of which I 

 have two. The natural notes of this bird are 

 very varied and powerful — many of them ex- 

 tremely sweet — and they readily imitate the 

 songs of other species and, indeed, almost any 

 other sound that they can compass. To those of 

 you who care about birds, and are not acquainted 

 with the Shama, I may say that this bird is 

 larger than a Redbreast, to which it has a cer- 



