bo Cerebral Investigation.


CEREBRAL INVESTIGATION.


By Evelyn Trenow.


Biids and animals will generally use their weapons of

offence or defence at the time of capture, either from a sense of

fright or in their endeavours to make escape from their captors,

but, until they are more or less used to their altered surround¬

ings, it is unusual for them to turn their attention to even their

natural enemies or prey. Thus, the newly-caught Owl will

ignore the mouse running around its cage in its search for

liberty, and the stoat and rat will glare ferociously at one another

for some time before the inevitable battle begins.


If, however, one may judge from the following, it would

appear that the Great Tit, although difficult to keep alive in

captivity, is the most self-possessed of live things, at all events

of the feathered sort, at the moment of its acquaintance with its

prison.


A desire to add some smaller British birds to an aviary

some years since induced me to set traps of various sorts on the

snow-covered ground. The birds were feeding voraciously on

anything they could find and were easily caught. One fall of

the sieve —and the old sieve trap wants a lot of beating — added a

Chaffinch, a Greenfinch, two Sparrows and a Great Tit to a good

morning’s bag. These were all turned into a large cage to be

sorted out as soon as catching had finished for the day, when

those unlikely to live in captivity were to be released.


Some earlier occupants of the cage, which had arrived but

half-an-hour or so before, included a few Blue Tits. These had

been dashing about wildly trying to escape, but at the time the

Great Tit and his fellow prisoners of the sieve were introduced,

were resting exhausted on the lower perches.


The Great Tit, however, had no two minds concerning his

mission in life, whether in a cage or outside, for he straightway

made for the top perch, balanced himself there for a few seconds,

then descended with a swoop on to one of the Blue Tits, burying

his beak in its skull. The Blue Tit of course was no more, and

the fear of another similar performance obtained for the Great

Tit his immediate freedom with the opportunity of continuing in

a wider sphere his craze for cerebral investigation.



