Miscellaneous. 383 



the large white cockatoo with the broad white crest is the most 

 intelligent of the lot. I had one of them whom I wished to keep 

 chained to a perch ; bnt though a first-rate London locksmith tried 

 everything his ingenuity could suggest, the cockatoo beat him 

 utterly. Without breaking it, he contrived to open the ring or 

 other contrivance for holding him, with his beak, though one or two 

 of them must, one would have thought, have required great study 

 to understand. 



The experiment of acclimatizing parrots has been tried on a some- 

 what large scale. AVe have had African, Amazonian, and Carolina 

 parrots ; E-osella parroquets, large Bengal parroquets, four species of 

 cockatoos, and two of lories. The lories are magnificent birds, with 

 their scarlet bodies and very long wings and tails of rich metallic 

 green. Curiously enough, however, they are far less seen than any 

 of the others, as they almost always sit buried in the thickest foliage, 

 and have none of the sensibility and intellectual excitement of the 

 cockatoos or parrots. In fact, however, all these birds vanish com- 

 pletely out of sight during great part of the day ; many of them, 

 indeed, live in the woods at a distance from the house ; but even 

 those who have selected the trees in the garden for their residence 

 would not easily be discovered. You would have supposed that at 

 any rate the white cockatoos would be visible anywhere ; but 

 the inclination of all animals is to slip out of the sight of man, 

 and with the shadows of the trees upon them an unpractised eye 

 would rarely discover them. In the morning and evening they come 

 to feed upon hemp-seed, and bread and milk, which is hung in a 

 basket from a tripod ; and then, I can assure you, the groups of them 

 are sometimes most beautiful. 



Lately we have had great losses, so many have flovm away and 

 been shot ; but I will read a memorandum which I put down one 

 day, a couple of years ago, of the scene I was watching, and which 

 recurred morning after morning as I sat reading in my study at my 

 house in Surrey. " The parrots' breakfast having been put in the 

 basket, a pair of white cockatoos, who had been anxiously watching 

 the proceedings from the tree above, swooped down and set instantly 

 to work. A Bengal parroquet, with long green wings, presently 

 comes skimming up and flutters for a few minutes almost perpen- 

 dicularly in the air, exactly in the attitude so often represented by 

 Mr. Gould in his ' Humming-Birds,' with the head and tail curved 

 inwards, and the wings extended. Two or three rose-coloured 

 cockatoos follow, and hang about on the tripod, but do not venture 

 to take their places on the edge of the basket while their fiercer 

 brethren are at work. But presently one of the huge white cock- 

 atoos, with yellow crests, comes swinging heavily down over the 

 lawn, putting all the lesser ones to flight in a moment ; but they 

 soon gather round again, and a lory, resplendent in red and green, 

 darts through the air, and lights on the top of the tripod, his 

 burnished hues contrasting well with the pure white of the cockatoo 

 below; and the group is completed by a Cornish chough, whose 

 glossy blue-black plumage and orange beak and legs are not the 



