6o Canaries and Cage-Birds. 



fresh-and-fresli is the rule, and fresh dainties will often induce a hen to feed when nothing else will. 

 And before examining into the contents of the egg-trough we will just say that, in addition to all 

 other, an unlimited supply of green food is necessary. This we give in one of the gallipots, putting 

 in a substantial bunch of chickweed and groundsel, young and tender, as well as watercresses and 

 lettuce. Fresh-and-fresh is again imperatively the rule here, or the water in the pot will soon 

 become offensive. The quantity of this sort of stuff consumed in a day is enormous. 



As regards the composition of the egg-food, there are almost as many recipes as there are 

 breeding-rooms. The staple commodity is hard-boiled &g%, with the addition of bread-crumbs, dry, 

 or soaked and squeezed dry; milk-biscuit, water-biscuit, sweet-biscuit, stale sponge-cake, or other 

 kind of farinaceous food, mixing in the beginning in the proportion of bulk for bulk, and decreasing 

 the quantity of &g% somewhat as the birds become older. We have tried them all, and have also 

 fed largely on egg and crushed hemp-seed with better results than from either. The fact is that 

 each is good, but every breeder naturally, and wisely too, recommends the particular mixture he 

 has found produce the best results. So much, however, depends on the birds themselves that it is 

 unfair to condemn one food or praise another unduly, when it is quite probable the experience of 

 some other breeder is at direct variance with our own as regards the effect of using some particular 

 diet. What succeeds in one bird-room is certain failure in another, and what one swears by another 

 proclaims to be poison. The same remarks hold good with respect to green food. One gives 

 chickweed and nothing else, avoiding groundsel above all things, and can tell you stories by the 

 yard how it killed a lot of young birds. Another will walk miles to find a few plants of groundsel, 

 and will pass acres of chickweed as worthless. One eschews lettuce, and gives dandelion, and each 

 gives a satisfactory reason why. A reason, even if a poor one, entitles any statement to respect, but 

 dogmatic assertion should never be listened to. We ourselves recommend finely-crushed hemp- 

 seed as having been a good servant to us, while another fancier will say it is the forbidden fruit, 

 the unclean thing, the abomination of abominations, and he would not have a grain in his room ; 



his diet is egg and — , it matters not what ; we may have tried the mixture, and our birds would 



not look at it. Our advice is to use any or all of the mixtures we have mentioned, and, in addition, 

 to add a pinch of maw-seed (poppy) or a little summer rape well scalded ; but whatever is 

 used, let it be fresh and sweet, and when one diet is found to be working well, go on with it, and 

 make hay while the sun shines. Our experience has ever been that when birds mean feeding they 

 will feed with anything ; and that when they do not intend to feed, nothing will tempt them to do 

 so freely — in short, it is a question of the health of the hen rather than biscuit v. hemp-seed. 

 Sanguine men and born theorists will say all this indicates defective knowledge and wrong treat- 

 ment. Men of our acquaintance, thinking men, who dislike groping in the dark and search deeply 

 for the how and why, have said so; but our reply has always been, "Go on long enough, and your 

 turn of bad luck will come." And it always does. The whole question finds a solution in the fact 

 that the Canary is neither wild nor tame; we do our best to reconcile the two conditions, and 

 sometimes succeed and sometimes — do not ; the one perhaps as frequently as the other, as a 

 comparison between the number of eggs hatched and the statistics contained in the Canary bills 

 of mortality will show. 



But everything has gone on swimmingly, and we have been voted a croaker by the reader — 

 too fond of looking on the dark side of the picture. The birds are now four or five days old, and 

 are as fat as moles. On looking at them in the morning, the breeder finds the down all gone 

 or tangled and matted with moisture. This is the first indication of the hen having begun 

 to "sweat" them, as it is not very elegantly called in the vernacular of the fancy, wliich slie 

 docs by sitting on them very closely, seldom leaving the nest even for a few moments. This, of 



