Edward Boosey—The Grass Parrakeets—Some Facts and Fictions 121


Turquoisine in the flesh, and if anybody had told me that I should one

day keep and breed Splendids I should have considered my informant

a definite, though possibly harmless, lunatic !


It was, I think, about 1923 that I first saw pairs of Blue-wings,

Elegants, and Turquoisines—all of them in Lord Tavistock’s collection

at Warblington.


When, in 1927, we started the Keston Foreign Bird Farm we were

particularly anxious to establish a strain of the various Grass Parrakeets,

and soon we had breeding pairs of Turquoisines, Elegants, Blue-wings,

and Bourke’s. For some time we attempted to breed them with their

nest-boxes in the shelters, but it was not until these were hung out in

the open run that any considerable measure of success was achieved.


For 3 ^ears, in fact up to the present winter, we were forced to treat

all our Grass Parrakeets as only semi-hardy, that is to say needing

a heated shelter in the winter, the reason for this being that they were

so extremely rare, and in case of losses so impossible to replace, that

we simply daren’t experiment with them.


This winter, however, we have kept two old breeding pairs of

Bourke’s and many of the young Bourke’s and Blue-wings out of doors

without heat, and have so far had no losses at all. It might be argued

that this winter has been so mild as to be no test of a bird’s hardiness,

but we have had, nevertheless, at least two spells of very cold weather

through which the birds remained quite unaffected.


Having bred no less than twenty-one Bourke’s and a considerable

number of Blue-wings during 1934, we felt ourselves to be in a

strong enough position numerically to be able to test their hardiness.

We were aware that one or two people had kept adult Bourke’s

and Blue-wings without heat during the winter, but were anxious

to test the hardiness or otherwise of young birds of the year.


We have twice attempted to winter Turquoisines without heat, but

in each case they got chills at the first onset of really cold weather,

necessitating their removal indoors. Elegants and Rock Grass

Parrakeets we have never yet been able to test, nor, I need scarcely

add, Splendids, though I see no reason why the two former should be

any less hardy than Blue-wings and I have a feeling that Splendids

will prove rather more robust than Turquoisines.



