Correspondence, Notes, etc.



43



nest, but in the inability of a finch—a bird that feeds its young, and mate,

on food regurgitated from the crop—to feed another young bird whose

parents drop the food into its widely gaping mouth. If anyone will watch

a pair of Canaries in the task, or duty, of attending to the requirements of

their offspring, it will be seen that the old Canary holds its beak at right

angles to that of the chick, and that the latter helps itself to the aliment

and does not have it thrust down its throat as is the case with the pseudo¬

finches. A Canary will rear the young of any other finch as readily as it

will its own, but the birds experimented with by Professor Scott are

Sparrows, and not finches, hence the failure.


I have experimented at different times with eggs of finches, e. g.

Linnets, Goldfinches, and Greenfinches, all of which my Canaries reared

successfully though they failed with Chaffinches and Cardinals.


It would be desirable to restrict the appellation FINCH to birds

that, like the Canary, feed their 3'oung and mate with food regurgitated

from the crop, and the difference not only in the mode of supplying food

but in the form of the mouth of the respective young is sufficient to

warrant the separation of the two classes of birds from each other. A

Sparrow might be taken as the type of the non-regurgitating class, and a

Canary of the other.


To briefly summarize the matter: it is impossible for a finch, using

the word in its natural and restricted sense, to feed a non-finch successfully,

as it is for the latter to rear a finch, and that from difference in the mode of

supplying the food on the part of the old birds, as well as from inability 011

the part of the young to receive it. W. T. Greene.


[We should be glad to hear what our members have to say on this

subject. Our own impression is that most if not all of the finches (and

we include in this term all those birds which Dr. Greene calls pseudo¬

finches) feed their young from the crop in the same way as Canaries, for the

first week or two of their lives at any rate.—E d.]


THE NESTING HABITS OF BRUSH TURKEYS.


Sir, —I was glad to see in your Magazine that two Brush-Turkeys

(Catheturus lathami ) had been hatched in the London Zoo., and I also hope

that those at Woburn Abbey will also be successful.


We have hatched and reared young birds here for some years past,

rarely missing a season, and I wrote an account of them in the Ibis, 1S99,

page 9. The Woburn Abbey birds and those in the London Zoo. were

reared in these Gardens, and we have some young birds in hand now.


The nesting habits of mound builders are always of interest, as for

instance, how they can tell when the mound is of sufficient heat to lay in :

but I think I have found a clue to that.


D. LE Souef,


April 20th, iqo4. Director, Zoological Gardens, Melbourne.



