OUR AVIARY 
189 
necessity of going out very early in the morning to get food for 
their young ; but as the window was of course still closed at 
that early hour, the male (?) bird was in the daily habit of 
fluttering in the face of the servant till she got up and opened 
the window. ..^=13 - 
They brought out and carried off four young ones, and soon 
after commenced to nest again. But there are objections to 
birds in a house, and a vigorous endeavour was made to prevent 
them. Nest after nest was destroyed, and at last, as they were 
seldom seen, we believed we had been successful in keeping 
them out ; but one day they were traced to the cornice of the 
window of my photographic room and were found to have made 
a nest with two eggs in it ; yet although they must have been 
constantly in and out they were rarely seen, and the discovery 
of the nest was quite accidental. They raised two little birds 
successfully. 
H. P. Hawkes. 
OUR AVIARY. 
T is wonderful how much pleasure one may derive from 
the keeping of even a small aviary. Tor the great 
charm of birds lies in their marked individuality : 
no two are ever quite alike, and half-a-dozen offer 
infinite variety of habit and disposition. Then, too, the aviary 
with its circumscribed space gives perhaps more scope to the 
student of this branch of natural history than a more extended 
field. Here he may see the birds in all stages of development, 
from the ugl)q shapeless nestling and the ball of fluff in all its 
newly fledged freshness, to the fully grown songster ; while the 
genuine lover of the feathered tribe will have endless oppor- 
tunities of observing the flirtations, squabbles, jealousies and 
reunions which go to make up bird-life. 
We began in a small way with one canary, or “ green bird,” 
properly speaking, for “Jim ” is a mixture of canary and finch. 
He was exceedingly tame from the first, and would jump at-;a 
given signal, shake hands, and come over and over again to 
have his beak pulled. This was in his gay bachelor days : 
latterly the cares of a family, and increasing age, have greatly 
sobered him, but he is still the tamest of all the birds, and 
the first to come and eat out of one’s hand. His moral qualities 
were, alas, always inferior to his intellectual, greed and 
jealousy being his besetting sins. As one cage after another 
was added to the collection, he would visit each in turn during 
his morning fly and forage for tit-bits, while if one dared to 
say good morning to any of the others first he would puff 
himself out with rage, or fly furiously at his own reflection in 
