248 Correspondence, Notes, etc.


which are even smaller than the Humming-bird lately exhibited, and much

more graceful in their movements. In asserting this I am thinking of the

African Estrelda minima, of smaller Orange-cheek Waxbills and others.


These small tropical finches are erroneously supposed to be sougless,

and so they are when they sit lifeless and puffy because terrorised in a large

aviary.* But when kept in pairs and suitably tended they are pictures of

health and agility and have each their own little expressive song. I lost

quite lately, from sheer old age, a pair of small Amaduvade Finches, and

quite miss the sweet peculiar little song of the male with which he enter¬

tained his wife many times a day.


The vSt. Helena Waxbill, with its sober grayish brown plumage and a

slight tinge of crimson on the lower part, looks an insignificant little bird

in an aviary, but when we look at a healthy specimen closely, we see the

brown plumage delicately pencilled with wave-like markings and the

crimson hue of the breast becomes very beautiful.


My Paradise Whydah sings to me for hours together, seems to have

endless chatter in a peculiar note which pleases without ever fatiguing the

listener. That these birds, when visiting the sand on the bottom of their

cages, sometimes run and scratch like a hen and carry their tail so that the

tips are just above the sand few would ever see in an aviary, nor could any¬

body watch the marvellous transformation which takes place when the

annual change of colour occurs, when a sober grey is transformed into rich

black and when a tail ten to twelve inches long grows in less than a month

at the rate of about half an inch per day.


My idea of a house for small foreign birds is and remains, that it

should be primarily devoted to the Finches and 'Waxbills. I should like to

see these shown in rows of roomy cages, intended to be models of comfort

for the birds, and such au exhibition should be arranged with some attempt

at classification and system, whilst now limited space brings strange and

incongruous fellows of captivity to the same food dish.


A row of cages showing in one the Calcutta species of Amaduvade

Finches, in the next the Madras kind and then the Japanese variety and the

slightly larger green Indian kind of the same family would make a beautiful

object of exhibition. If, instead of having a dozen of the small Biclieno’s

or Double-banded Australian Finches sitting lifeless in one row L in a Parrot

cage, one pair were housed in a proper cage, these little beauties would look

very different and a row of representative pairs of the many beautiful

species of Australian Finches would surprise the beholders, and I go a

step further and would like to see a pair of Siberian or Himalayan Gold¬

finches shown side by side with a pair of their European cousins for

comparison.



* We have often noticed that small foreign birds which have never been heard to

sing when caged have immediately commenced to do so, and to show every sign of perfect

happiness, when liberated into a large aviary even when the latter has contained many

other birds of varying sizes. Ed.



