on the Breeding of the Black-cheeked Lovebird. 321


stared me in the face, and became more and more stubborn as

nests were built, eggs laid, and young birds made their appear¬

ance. My pale-eyed bird is the male, the two dark-eyed are

females ; and I must ask our readers to alter “ male” to “ female,”

and vice versa, in their copies of my previous account, of the

Black-cheeked Lovebird so far as the references are to my own

birds.


It seems to me that the evidence points rather strongly to

there being a sexual difference in the colour of the iris, that of

the adult male being of a perceptibly lighter shade than that of

the female. The eyes of the nestlings, as far as I was able to

make anything of them, were black, or at any rate very dark.


Speaking of parrots generally, in those species which in¬

dicate the sex by the colour of the eye, is it not usually the young

and the female that have the darker eye? If so, the Black¬

cheeked Lovebird appears to follow this rule.


The story of my odd female—the “Immature male” of

page 209—is of some interest, and may be brought in here.


When the birds, the original five, were unexpectedly

dumped down before me, they were still in the dark travelling

cage in which they had just arrived from Germany. Four of

them were 011 a perch at the back, the fifth on the bottom of the

cage. Of the four 011 the perch, three, directly they were un¬

covered, commenced to shriek, and flick their tails, and gesticu¬

late like mad creatures, each one encouraging and inciting its

companions ever to greater and more strenuous efforts towards

uproar and confusion : in my innocent and chivalrous heart, I

supposed that they must be males. Alas! I now know that they

were yelling out “Votes for women!” The fourth, sandwiched

in between the shrieking three and the side of the box, had been

horribly mangled by its companions, and was in a bad wajr. I

concluded that it would have been thus maltreated by those of

its own sex, and consequently that it too must be a male. Alas,

once more ; I had forgotten the tricoteuses of ’92 over the way,

and the scenes that were going on less than one hundred years

ago in the neighbourhood of Parliament Square, and elsewhere,

revealing to us how unlovely woman can be when she is not true

to herself. So I will not offer any apology for having reversed



