All Ricjiits Reserved. June, 1912. 
BIRD NOTES: 
THE 
JOURNAL OF THE FOREIGN BIRD CLUB. 
My Aviaries, 
By Philip Gosse, M.B.O.U. 
Oui' Editor luis asked me, at very short notice, for 
an account (short history) of my aviaries. But there is so 
little to tell, and my aviaries, compared with those of most of 
our meuibcrs, are but poor things.* 
Three years ago, when I first started bird-keeping,, 
I built an open aviary with wire -netting on all sides and a 
shelter at one corner. In my innocence, I thought that, when 
rough weather came on the birds would hurry into the shelter 
until better conditions prevailed. This of course they did not 
do and often paid the penalty of their folly with their lives. 
After this bad start I completely boarded up both 
ends and back, and covered in rather more than half of the 
top — as a result the birds did much better. But I was not 
"put of the wood yet," my next trouble was rats. My aviary 
being near the bank of an estuary of the Solent (the Beaulieu 
River), these pests were rather abundant and they used .to 
carry off several birds in a night. To meet this difficulty 
I sunk some half-inch mesh wire-netting eighteen inches into 
the ground all round the aviary; I also cemented the whole 
of the floor of the back half of aviary; since doing this, 
some three years ago, I have not seen a rat in the aviary. 
One of their victims was a Greater Spotted Wood- 
pecker (Dendrocopus major), which on the whole was quite 
the nicest bird I iiave ever kept. I had only to appear 
* It will be a bad day for "B.N." and for aviculture generally, when 
only large aviaries are considered worthy of note ; very many of our most 
interesting records and facts have come from those with only moderate sized 
" ramshackle" aviaries. (" Ramshackle " does not apply to Dr. (Josse's avi- 
aries, but it certainly has to many of my own), and we trust that, compar- 
atively speaking, second rate aviary accommodation will not deter members 
from recording the episodes that take place therein. - Ed. 
