46 
A NATURALIST ON THE PROWL . 
unfledged parrots, crowded as close as bottles on a shelf, 
all bobbing their foolish heads’ incessantly and joining 
their hundred voices in meaningless infant cries. Men 
will buy them for two or three annas each and carry them 
off to all quarters of the native town, intending, I doubt 
not, to treat them kindly ; but “the tender mercies of the 
wicked are cruel,” and confinement in a solitary cell, the 
discipline with which we reform hardened criminals, is 
misery enough to a bird with an active mind, without the 
superadded horrors of poor Poll’s life in a tin cage, hung 
from a nail in the wall of a dark shop in Abdool Rahman 
Street. Her floor is tin and her perch a thin iron wire, 
so her poor feet are chilled all night, and if her prison 
chance to hang where the sun can reach it, then for a 
change they are grilled all day. Why does the Society 
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals never look into 
the woes of parrots ? 
On this side of India we have four kinds of parrots, or, 
more properly, parrakeets, for they have all long tails. 
The commonest is the Rose-ringed Parrakeet, neat but not 
gaudy in its bright green suit, with a necklace of pink and 
black ribbon and a beak of red coral. I suppose that 
three-fourths of the inmates of the jails of our Bombay 
