and other Notes on Birds at The Vern



143



not do on seed alone. Mine eat canary seed, soft food, meal-worms,

grapes, apples, pears, and bananas.


Mr. Webb brought over, with many other interesting birds, a

beautiful pair of subspecies of Von Heuglin’s Robin-Chats, called the

Mombasa White-browed Robin-Chat (Cossypha heuglini intermedia).

I had to have them, and brought them home in joy. They were tame

in their neat travelling cages but, in their freer home, they soon forgot

about human companionship and preferred discreet solitude to the

temptation of meal-worms. They became so secretive that I thought

they might be nesting—a groundless and fantastic hope, but their voices

(for they both sing, though the hen does so with less abandon) have

surprised, and even startled, people hearing them for the first time.

It is an almost unbelievable sound—well off the note—and loud, so

loud that on a still evening a quarter of a mile from their aviary you

may think that the bird has escaped and be within a few yards of you.

Roulade after roulade bursts forth as from some Prima Donna Manquee,

careless, inaccurate, ill-trained, ecstatic, rough, discordant, but in¬

tensely exciting—yet all that cock did while in his cage was to warble

sibilantly and invitingly. Now to see his throat swell is prelude to

music of incredible wildness.


They sing most fiercely just before dusk and right through until

it is quite dark, and in the morning their voices sometimes wake you

before it is light.


Tragedy came last summer in the escape of a much prized Cardinal

Honey-eater ( Myzomela cardinalis), a beautiful bird—but a bully;

in the autumn with the death of a Mombasa Collared Sunbird (Ant-

wreptes collaris elachior) which, I think, got too fat on Humming-bird

food : he was a really delightful little bird in an outside aviary (both

these birds were gifts from our Editor); and in the early winter with

the death of Robert and Roberta, a pair of Macklot’s Pittas (Pitta

mackloti) brought over by Mr. Erost.


If I ever have these lovely birds again, I think I shall risk them

out through the winter. They looked, and were, so fat and w~ell outside,

but, in October, I thought they had that look of “ feeling cold ”, so

I put them in the greenhouse. By December Roberta was still

blooming, but Robert had sat for a week on the hot pipes which, in



