NOTES AND QUERIES. J 55 



the end of August. The staple food which I prepared for my Blue Robins, 

 and upon which they partly fed their young one, was a mixture of crumbled 

 stale bread (two parts), Abraham's insectivorous birds' food (one part), 

 prepared yolk of egg (one part), dried ants' eggs (one part), and grocer's 

 currants (one part) slightly damped ; I also gave them small earth-worms 

 mixed with gardeu-mould in a large saucer, spiders of all sizes in quantity, 

 flies, butterflies, moths, chrysalides, caterpillars, a few meal-worms, and 

 beetles. One point in the feeding which I have not seen recorded interested 

 me greatly : — It is well known to all breeders of both British and foreign 

 finches that they always feed one another and their young from the crop ; 

 they never give them food which is not partially digested, so that the 

 young are fed not only on vegetable or insect food, but upon half-digested 

 and softened seeds ; but it was quite a new fact to me that soft-billed 

 birds prepared food for their young: indeed I know that our Robin, 

 Blackcap, and in fact our Warblers generally, Thrushes of all kinds, 

 Starlings, and Tits, merely crush or break up the worms or insects with 

 which they feed their young. In the case of the Tits this does not 

 appear to be done, or, if so, only in the privacy of the nesting-hole. My 

 Blue-birds, however, generally crushed the food, and invariably swallowed 

 it, disgorging and swallowing several times before giving it to the young 

 bird ; if half-a-dozen house-flies were given they would frequently swallow 

 the whole, and give them to the young bird in one mouthful. The first 

 time that I observed the old birds swallowing the insects put into the aviary 

 for the benefit of the young one, I felt much annoyed, as it was not easy 

 work to keep up a supply of insect food, even in the summer, in the 

 suburbs of London ; but presently I saw a convulsive movement in the 

 throat, and the insects reappeared in the beaks of the parent birds, each of 

 which in turn carried the food to the nestling. The young bird left the 

 nest when twenty-three days old : I had been led to suppose that he w r ould 

 resemble the hen, but, in addition to his greatly inferior size and spotted 

 breast, he was altogether of a far more cinereous tint. In about eight or 

 ten days he was perfectly able to feed himself, and the parents then abso- 

 lutely disregarded all his cries for food. After their moult I found my 

 Blue Robins troublesome in the bird-room, as they not only ate all the eggs 

 laid by my Mannikins (Munia sp.), but chased these little birds, and the 

 still smaller Waxbills (Estrelda sp.), all over the aviary, to their injury, as 

 in their fear they dashed themselves recklessly against the wires, and were 

 afraid to feed and bathe quietly ; I therefore removed the Blue-birds to one 

 of my out-door aviaries, where they soon appeared to be quite at home. 

 The Blue Robin is said to be able to withstand the cold of an English 

 winter in an unheated aviary ; my experience has shown me that this 

 assertion should be received with caution. In the aviary in which I placed 

 my birds there are two small snuggeries, — a cocoa-nut nest and a Canary's 



