Correspondence, Notes, etc. 183


That someone presented an Amazon Parrot with a request that it be

placed ill the Parrots’ Flight Aviary proves nothing. We see lots of well-

meaning people who cover their cages of small birds at dusk in winter, and

wonder that the poor things do not survive sixteen or seventeen hours

darkness and enforced fast. They kill them by misplaced kindness.


Mr. Pocock criticises me because I am not as delighted as he is with

what he calls the mechanical unanimity in the wheeling flight of a lot of

Budgerigars. The truth is that these pretty little Undulated Parrakeets in

the Canal Bank Aviary come down singly in rapid succession to the food

table. Whilst they are busy feeding, a Cockatoo flops into their midst and

frightens the whole flock, which flies certainly with unanimity under the

same impulse of fright, following its leader as does a flock of sheep. They

would fly as far as they could, but the limits of the aviary preventing their

flying as far as they otherwise would do, the wheeling flight results, which

is in no sense “ an environment similar to their natural conditions.”


In a state of nature the Budgerigar or Undulated Parrakeet lives in

Australia exclusively on grass seed undisturbed by any other creature.

When grass seed fails in a period of drought, the flocks will fly immense

distances in search of a spot where thunderstorms or humidity of the soil

have produced grass seed. For this purpose nature has endowed these

beautiful little creatures with the faculty to fly straight and very rapidly,

and to subsist for weeks and months, without a drop of water, on nothing

but dry seeds. They undertake these long flights only under the impulse

of necessity. They would be perfectly happ}' if left to themselves and to a

disb of diy' Canary seed, with an easily imitated dry gum tree with plenty

of perpe?idicular holes.


Mr. Pocock, writing of the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo as “a

creature, the conspicuous whiteness of whose plumage, whose leisurely

flight and noisy demeanour all bespeak the powerful bird, fearless of

attack and heedless of concealment,” evidently aims at some theory of

natural evolution. I have been wondering whether there is some to me

unknown wild indigenous animal in Australia which would attack this

noisy bird of spotless white—which innocent white, by the way, comes off

when touched by a coloured cloth.


I have been reminded by this Cockatoo of some one in Europe who

also loudly asserts himself fearless of attack when nobody dreams of attack¬

ing him and who frequently disturbs the meals and rest of innocent smaller

people. However that is another matter and herewith my reply to Mr.

Pocock ends. I have taken his criticisms in good part and I trust he will

read my rejoiner in the same spirit. I will reply to his Uatin quotation

with a French one :—“ De la discussion jaillit la lumiere.”


That tbe British Song Birds wintered in the Waders’ Aviary ought to

have had some better contrived protection against, snow, sleet or very

severe frost, than the kind of hen coop into which very few song birds will

ever dive, is not open for discussion.



