THE



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BEING THE JOURNAL OF THE


A V1CULTURAL SOCIETY.









VOL. V. — NO. 52.



All rights reserved.



FEBRUARY, 1899.









THE RUFOUS-TAILED GRASSFINCH.


Bathilda ruficauda.


By D. Seth-Smith, F.Z.S.


The subject of our plate this month is a rare and very

beautiful little finch which inhabits (so the British Museum

Catalogue informs us) “North Western and Northern Australia,

Queensland, New South Wales and the interior of Australia.”

Being thus widely distributed over the Australian Continent, it

is strange that living specimens should not be more frequently

imported into Europe than they are at present.


Very little indeed appears to be known of the habits of

Bathilda ruficauda in a wild state. Gould observed it amongst

rushes in marshy situations along the sides of streams, and

collected specimens on the Liverpool Plains and along the banks

of the Rivers Mokai and Namoi.


About the commencement of the year 1894 a few pairs of

the “ Starfinch,” as the species is called in Australia, were

received by a London bird-dealer, who naturally asked very

high prices for them. The following year several more living

specimens reached England ; and at the Crystal Palace Show

in February, 1896, no less than four pairs of Rufous-tails were

exhibited.


No specimens have, to the writer’s knowledge, been

imported since, and at the present time this little bird is, so far

as English aviculturists are concerned, one of the rarest of

foreign finches. The present writer obtained a pair of these

birds in December, 1897, which had then been in England for

probably a year or more. They were not in the best of plumage,

and the cock had lost almost all the feathers from the back of

his head. They seemed, however, to be in good health, and

the cock spent most of his time, when not actually eating or

sleeping, in uttering, with outstretched neck, his peculiar little

pretence at a song.



