72 
RED AND BLUE MAO AW. 
Mr. Wiener’s account of his experience with this bird and its fellow, 
which forms the subject of our next chapter, is brief and to the point: 
“The Macaws I may dismiss with a very few words. I tried a Red 
and Yellow Macaw, and a Blue and Yellow Macaw. A couple of ex- 
pensive cages were demolished very quickly, and before a pair of stands 
could be finished by the maker. The destruction of the hard wood 
perches and mahogany uprights of their new stands afforded about 
two days’ amusement to the birds, who next peeled off the wall-paper 
within reach, and gnawed the corner of a billiard-table. This mischief 
was accompanied by such deafening screams, that a couple of weeks’ 
possession had quite settled my determination to get rid of the mag- 
nificent Macaws on any terms, and never to buy one again at any 
piice. Their huge size, brilliant feathers, and loud screams are a very 
good advertisement for a travelling menagerie, to whom amateurs had 
better abandon these birds, unless some one would care to construct a 
wrought-iron in-door aviary (I doubt whether bricks and mortar would 
be proof against their beaks), to make an attempt at breeding. A pair 
exhibited some years since at the Crystal Palace were said to have 
laid eggs in confinement: and as Macaws always arrive in Europe 
quite tame, it ought to be possible to breed them.” 
From the foregoing account it would appear that Mr. Wiener was 
unfortunate in his experience, and that instead of a couple of tame 
birds, he was imposed upon, and induced to buy two, caught when 
adult, which, as Bechstein well observes, “are savage and untractable, 
and would only stun one with their unbearable cries, the faithful 
interpreters of their different passions.” 
“Yes”, writes Mr. Gedney, who, by the bye, calls this bird “the 
Military Macaw , “an old trapped Macaw affords plenty of 'raw ma- 
terial upon which the advocates of 'moral suasion’, as a means of 
taming wild creatures, might very well try their hands. I knew one 
bird that defied every effort made to tame him, and he killed a bull 
terrier that shared his place in the stables: you could not live in the 
house with him! Both his wings were broken in this terrific battle, 
and a pietty spectacle the place presented when the man went as 
usual to feed him in the morning. There laid poor Tyke dead, with 
lus throat torn open, the bird, covered with blood and almost featherless, 
stood by, with distended and drooping wings, a perfect scarecrow, 
shrieking at intervals, either in spite or pain. What was to be done 
with the creature? Kill him, every one said but the man who looked 
after the bird; so his belief that the injuries would tame him saved 
his (the bird’s) life: and the cripple was consequently shut up in a 
pig-stye. His wings got well, the bones growing out of place, but 
