5



I have been taken to task over my last article on Pekin

Robins, because I ventured to run counter to the ‘ authorities.’

Nevertheless, I must do so again here.


Mr. Gedney says that the four eggs were laid at intervals

during eight days. All I can say is, mine laid every day like a

well regulated bird. The cock, again, is stated to have settled

down upon the eggs in the hen's absence. Mine was never so

incautious.


The young were hatched quite naked. Mine were covered

over with dark fluff.


The young, says Mr. Gedney, fledge rapidly, and leave the

nest at the end of five weeks. I can only say with Dominie

Sampson, Prodigious!!! Mine must have been very previous ;

as they left at the end of ten days !


Judging from “ internal evidence,” I should doubt Mr.

Gedney’s account of the nesting of the Virginian Cardinal.



II.


By the Rev. H. D. Astley.


Even to those uninterested in the ways and habits of

birds, the following experiment must prove attractive. Experi¬

ment is hardly the word, for it was by an accident that

a pair of Virginian Cardinals ( Cardinalis cardinalis') made

their escape from a large pheasautry, where they had been for

two years, and had become inured to the many atmospheric

changes of our climate; not that they are ever delicate birds, for

they make little of a November fog or a January snowstorm.

However, they escaped on the 15th of May (1885), and as they

kept about I did not take much trouble to get them in again,

but put out their tin of canary seed so that they might not starve,

and also as an extra inducement for them not to wander far from

home. The pheasautry in which they had been confined is

situated amongst bushes, and close by a rookery, which is all

paled in, and adjoins the front garden lawns and a fairly large

shrubbery, the home of many a bird ; rich in the growth of

syringas, lilacs, box trees, and many other shrubs, amongst

which spring up old elms, limes and firs. To this retreat, the

Virginian Cardinals soon found their way, and the following

morning after their escape, on going through the shrubbery^, I

saw the cock bird perched on the tip-top of a hawthorn. There

he was, singing as loud and as fast as the notes would come, his

beautiful scarlet breast looking more brilliant than usual in the



