A Talk about 
Foreign Birds. 
( i6 5) 
THE BIRD WORLD. 
Food, Feeding, and Water. 
The food supply in an aviary should be kept on 
or near the floor, as by having the food vessels 
higher up the birds are more ready to sit on 
them when not feeding, and so keep the others 
back. It is all the better if you can have a 
gravitation water supply in the aviary, with 
each saucer doing service for two compartments. 
Let the water run off at least once a day, rinse 
the saucers well out, and if the spigot should be 
leaking a little so much the better. I think I 
hear someone say : “ I cannot have an aviary. 
I have no place to erect one, not even a back¬ 
yard.” You can keep foreign birds for all that. 
For six months of the year I keep many of my 
foreigners in three-feet cages, and they are 
bright and happy among themselves and a 
source of ioy to their owner. 
The Birds Themselves. 
Having gone through the preliminaries of 
foreign bird-keeping, let us now proceed to have 
a talk about the birds themselves. When being 
shown through some fanciers’ stock of birds 
I sometimes ask if they do not think of adding 
a pair or two of foreigners to their collection. 
Their answer regularly is : “ Foreigners are 
pretty, but I am not fond of them. I prefer the 
British and Canaries.” Foreign birds are like 
some foreign fruits—you don’t care for them at 
first, yet you acquire a liking for them. When 
I first procured a copy of the “ Avicultural Maga¬ 
zine * 1 scanned the contents, and thought there 
was nothing in it to interest me. But, as I had 
paid something like iod. for its few sheets, I 
put myself under the penalty of reading it, so 
as to try and get a return for my pioney. It 
does not need a deep pocket to start keeping 
foreign birds. Many interesting and charming 
species cost little more than British, and, as 
most readers of The Bird World already keep 
some British, they will understand the rudiments- 
of bird-keeping, and be able to manage 
foreigners right away without any trouble. 
Canaries were originally foreign birds. All the 
different varieties of Canaries have sprung frorri 
a little greenish-grey bird found in the Canary 
Islands, and the different types and colours of 
Canaries are the work of artificial selection. 
Dealers advertise many different kinds of birds- 
as wild Canaries, but these mostly are only 
nearly-related species, for the genuine wild 
Canary is comparatively rare in the trade, but 
is sometimes brought home by people who are- 
returning from convalescence. 
(To be continued.) > 
Photo : 
Kittiwakes at Home on Ailsa Craig. 
[Fred Hallam. 
