166 CLASS AVES. 



In the fields they eat grasshoppers, beetles, worms, and ants, 

 and cut up and destroy the tender buds and flowers. They 

 eat more than cocks and hens, probably in consequence of 

 the less length of their intestines. 



Ten females may be given to a single male pintado. The 

 female lays usually at the end of May, or in the early days 

 of June, and the eggs are generally from sixteen to four-and- 

 twenty in number. The shell is very hard, of a yellowish 

 white, spotted with small brown points. The female deposits 

 them in a retired place, under some bush. She seldom sits 

 with any assiduity, nor when the young are disclosed does 

 she display any great affection for them. It is therefore 

 found more profitable to have their eggs hatched by a hen. 

 The incubation lasts three weeks, and three or four days. 

 The young, as we before hinted, are very delicate and diffi- 

 cult to be brought up, requiring much attention in the article 

 of food. They should be placed in a dry situation, where 

 insects are not wanting. The casque on the top of the head, 

 and the barbies of the lower jaw, are not to be distinguished 

 before the birds are six months old. Towards that time these 

 appendages begin to make their appearance, and the epoch is 

 critical for the young pintados. They then become liable to 

 maladies, from which they cannot be preserved but by great 

 care and suitable nourishment. 



A considerable difference between the common hen and the 

 pintado is, that the intestinal tube is much shorter in pro- 

 portion in the last, being but three feet long, without reckon- 

 ing the cceca, which are each six inches. They proceed 

 widening from their origin, and receive the vessels of the 

 mesentery, like the other intestines. The largest intestine is 

 the duodenum, which is more than eight lines in diameter. 

 The gizzard is like that of the hen, and small gravel stones 

 are found there as in that bird. Sometimes indeed nothing 

 else is found there, the consequence apparently of the animal 



