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Norman G. Allison — St. Helena Seed-eaters



in curbing my curiosity for some days, until I was eventually rewarded

in seeing two heads appear over the edge of the nest at feeding time.

On the 2nd June the first youngster left the nest, followed on the

5th by the second. Then more trouble occurred, for the cock bird,

which all the way through had not been on at all good terms with

the hen, commenced to persecute the babies and, had I not luckily

spotted him going for one, I firmly believe he would have eventually

killed them both—in fact, I now think that the reason the others were

found dead was that the cock had killed them through jealousy.

I promptly removed him to another cage in sight of the hen and she

has done her duty so well that they are now feeding themselves, and

I intend to-morrow (9th June) to separate them altogether from the hen.


The two youngsters are very much like the hen in appearance,

except that the first one out of the nest is a cock, as he is slightly

lighter in body colour with a faint tinge of green on wings, rump, and

tail, whereas the other is extremely dark with an obvious hen look.


They were supplied daily with a handful of fresh seeding grass,

which at this time of the year is very plentiful, and of which they are

very fond, insectivorous mixture, ordinary egg-food mixed with a

little rape and maw seed, foreign bird seed mixture, and a hopper of

Goldfinch mixture. They also had about thirty mealworms daily and,

as far as it was possible to ascertain, the hen alone fed the youngsters,

and the main items of food were the mealworms, egg-food and seeding

grass—they hardly partook of any millet seed during the whole period

of rearing.


The youngsters are now twenty-three days old and fine healthy

little chaps they look, well repaying the attention that has been

bestowed upon them. The hen, by the way, is now thinking about a

further effort to bring some more Cockney Seed-eaters into the world.


They are the only foreign birds I have so far succeeded in breeding

this year, the reason, I am afraid, being the wretched weather we have

experienced in London. Even my Long-tailed G-rassfinches, wdiich

reared young last year, have done nothing else but fight terribly this

year, until they now look very bedraggled, and the hen very bare round

the face. I also had the bad luck to lose my hen Gouldian Finch during

a particularly severe cold spell, with egg-binding, and upon examining



