On the Yellow Budgerigar.



35



four days later the whole brood were out, but the last, and

apparently the youngest, two, are weak flyers (September ioth).


The hen did all the incubation and feeding.


The only distinction between the parents and the young

is, apparently, that the beaks of the latter have a pinkish tinge.


The food taken during rearing consisted of bread and

milk (boiled), fresh ants’ eggs, an occasional taste of orange,

hemp, canary, and millet seeds and millet spray, but chiefly

bread and milk and hemp.


The old birds have never taken any interest in any sort of

green food, but are particularly fond of plantain heads. Before

breeding I never knew them take any other food than canary

and millet seed and occasionally a bit of apple.*



THE YELLOW BUDGERIGAR.


By the Rev. C. D. Farrar.


I have often asked people about Budgerigars, and I have

always got some such reply as this: ‘ In order to get good


breeding results you want a big flock; a single pair will never

do any good.’ Now I have been told so many queer things, and

have read still queerer in books, that while not going perhaps

quite so far as David as to say that ‘ all men are liars,’ (I mean,

of course, ‘bird men’) yet I think that a good many have the

habit, as an old woman once said to me, of ‘walking round the

truth.’ I argued thus : Most birds, when breeding, like a place

to themselves and are very jealous of intruders. Why should

Budgerigars be an exception?! May not want of success in

breeding with a single pair be due to other causes? Stupidity

in management, bad nesting accommodation, or a hundred other

things? At any rate, I determined to try with one pair, just

from sheer cussedness. It is not everyone that can afford a



'Blackberries are now greedily eaten. I supply them on the stalks in a bottle of water.—J.W.


+ Most aviculturists know that single pairs of Budgerigars will breed quite success¬

fully, in fact we have even known a pair to breed in a large cage; but the fact remains

that, being naturally gregarious, they will breed often with greater success, when two or

more pairs are kept in the same place.—E d.



