224 



THE YOUNG 



NATURALIST. 



" Upon thy sloping banks, and lovely glens, 

 Thy wide extended moors, and mountains 

 hoar, 



My country ! many a beauteous flower be- 

 neath 



The eye of morning smiles in gracefulness 

 And beauty ; but, the chief o'er all the rest, 

 Old Scotland's "symbol dear," which he, 

 the Bard 



Of Coila, hath immortalised, and spared 

 The inspiring emblem waving in the breeze, 

 I love to mark," 



ANIMAL LONGEVITY. 



One of the "oldest inhabitants " of the 

 Zoological Gardens — the Black Parrot of 

 Madagascar — has recently died, having been 

 fifty-four years in confinement in Regents 

 Park. Attention has consequently been 

 called to the age attained by this bird and 

 to the age of animals generally. Parrots 

 and their kindred have always been looked 

 upon as long-lived birds ; and though per- 

 haps the stories of their attaining the age of 

 one hundred years and upwards are without 

 absolute verification, there does not appear 

 to be any special reason for disbelieving 

 them, or, at all events, for doubting that 

 they are approximately correct. In a public 

 institution like the Zoological Gardens, 

 authentic records are necessarily kept, and 

 the correct data can be easily ascertained. 

 But among the thousands of parrots kept 

 as domestic pets, few, if any, of the owners 

 have any evidence as to when they were 

 first brought to England, except in those 

 cases perhaps where the date is so recent as 

 to be of no consequence. The original 

 owner dies, and the bird passes into other 

 hands. The age of the bird is of less con- 

 sequence than its power of speech, and 

 while the purchaser of a parrot is certain 

 to make enquiries as to the birds' vocabulary 



and ability to acquire new words and 

 phrases, he cares little how long it had been 

 in the hands of its recent possessor, or to 

 how many previous owners it had belonged, 

 The writer knows of a yellow-crested cocka- 

 too that has been in one family for over 

 thirty years, but how long it had lived 

 before that he has no knowledge, and there 

 are abundant instances of similar or longer 

 periods of survival. Humbolt tells a pathetic 

 story of a parrot he met with among the 

 Maypures of the Orinocco, This bird spoke 

 an unknown language, the tribe among 

 whom it had learned to talk having all died. 

 Whether they had been destroyed in fight, 

 or by some fell disease, or whether they 

 had gradually died out, they were all gone, 

 and but the parrot remained, to chatter to 

 those who understood not, the pet words of 

 its former owners. But even of this bird 

 there is no evidence of the age it had 

 attained, and it may not have been nearly 

 so old as the circumstances seemed to 

 suggest. 



With regard to many birds besides the 

 Parrot, evidence more or less authentic 

 points to the great age attained by Ravens, 

 Jackdaws, and even Crows. Eagles, too, 

 are said to have lived beyond the century, 

 and of the numerous small birds we have 

 domesticated, some are known to have lived 

 what seems a very long period. Thus 

 evidence has been educed that the Canary 

 the Goldfinch and other small birds have 

 been kept in confinement for twenty years 

 or thereabouts, and some of these species will 

 pair and continue to breed in confinement. 



There can be little doubt that the average 

 duration of life in confinement in those 

 animals that bear domestication well is 

 longer than their existance in a wild state. 

 Carnivorous birds and mammals destroy 

 annually large [numbers of the species on 

 which they prey. Scarcity of food and 

 severity of weather also kill off enormous 

 numbers. From ills like these, they are 



