U2 On Lear's Macaw.


coloured : black with a yellow stripe down each side of it, to

carry on the yellow of the bare patches of skin at the corners of

the month. These patches are of a lighter yellow than the skin

around the eyes, which is more orange in tint. The feet and legs

also are black (or what one calls black) and the toes are long and

well shaped. Indeed, as my Italian servant said to me about the

Lear's Macaw I have in Italy, "e proprio un papagallo signorile,"

— a real gentleman amongst parrots, an aristocrat.


The Lear's Macaws can make themselves heard, no doubt

about that, but it is a voice of a much less strident ear-piercing

tone than that of the vari-coloured large Macaws : it has more

of the Carrion-Crow 'timbre' in it.


As to intelligence, I consider them most highly intelligent

birds. One of mine, the one I know best, for I have not seen

much of the other two, shows joy at seeing me and having a

game of play, more keenly than any bird I have ever met with.

He simply entreats me to take him off his perch, stretching out

first one foot and then the other, and trying to feed me. He

loves a game with a handkerchief. It is thrown right on to his

head, covering it completely up, upon - which he proceeds to

dance up and down in great glee, and at last either dances it off,

or else pulls it off with one claw, holding it, and then laughing

loudly and in a most human way ; waiting for the fun to be

commenced all over again.


If he is put on a table, and I sit on a chair close by, he

backs over the edge of the table with a foot waving round to find

a foothold on my knees, and will return again and again however

often he is displaced. He spreads his wings out froni the

shoulders with the ends of the wings kept in place, and whispers

and "purrs," stretching out his neck and cocking his head on

one side.


He can articulate too. " Cockatoo" he can say very plainly

in a tiny voice, and "Ara," etc., and he can imitate duckings and

various sounds that go towards making up the vocabulary of

one's bird talk.


As to his food ; I need say nothing much about that, ex-

cept that he likes sun-flower seed chiefly, with apple, banana or

pear in the morning, and at five o'clock tea he always has some



