Correspondence, Notes, etc. 117



hand hanging down, and the other placed (evidently by the photographer)

on the pedestal ! Sham flowers in an impossible vase, and perhaps a

ragged old mat supposed to be grass. Compare those photographs with the

modern ones by some of the best photographers. The early ones were

dreadful because utterly unnatural. So too with pictures of birds sitting on

nothing but an oval of ground the size of a five shilling-piece.


So too with a stuffed bird pinned on to a square block of wood ; and

compare those with the birds at the Natural History Museum, stuffed with

their natural surroundings and in natural positions.


I have been looking through the back numbers of the last two years,

and I am obliged to confess that I cannot find one single portrait of a bird

which is not most clearly defined both in colour and form, etc., and which

would not lose very greatly in beauty and other ways could one suddenly

blot out any adjuncts, and leave the bird sitting on nothing but a bare bit

of branch.


Hubert D. Asteey.



SUCCESSFUL BREEDING OF THE SCALY-BREASTED COLIN.


Sir, —I purchased from Green, of Covent Garden, early last summer,

a pair of Scaly-breasted Colins, Callipepta squamata. After having been

kept for a little while in an aviary they were liberated in the garden

enclosure. Here they went to nest under a shelter of thorns and bracken

on the side of a dry bank. O11 August 12, eleven nestlings were hatched

out of a total of thirteen eggs. I cannot describe the nestling downy

plumage as I was away when they were hatched, but that of a bird ten days

old, of which I have a skin, is very curious, not showing the very smallest

resemblance to that of the old birds: no suggestion of grey, but light ochre

sides of head, with broad baud of vandvke brown from back of crest-

feathers (even at this age developing!) right down back of head. Back,

scapulars and wing-coverts brown, with central longitudinal stripe.


They became strong on the wing, flying up to feed, and some of them

flew right out into the garden, over the 6ft. wire netting, but were captured,

brought back and had their wings cut.


The brood was a late one ; the weather about as bad as it well could

be, and one by one they died, the last survivor on October 19th. The

parent birds are well, are still out of doors, and, like the Common Quails,

Chukors, Cholmley’s Partridge, and other birds in the same enclosure,

appear quite indifferent to cold.


Our part of Hampshire has suffered ever since last autumn from a

plague of bank voles and short-tailed field mice. Every day we take them

in the traps; the Barn Owls, which are numerous here (bred in the boxes)

catch numbers of them, but the plague goes on. I refer to this for the sake

of saying that each morning, as soon as I begin whistling up the birds for

their feed, two bank voles at once come out, one from either side of the



