R. James—Rearing British Finches



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REARING BRITISH FINCHES


By Bichard James


The average bird fancier, keeper, or student cannot afford to be

reticent. The hobby is too involved for one to hope to gain one’s

precious data from one’s own experiences only.


Often the more ingenious fancier would seem to be too modest to

write of his findings, and it is left to the less ingenious to provoke

him into shedding his modesty.


Dr. Amsler seems to have had considerable experience with

breeding birds and, as an experimentalist, the said fancier is most

enterprising. In reading of this fancier’s failures, I have gained more

help, and also, I must confess, have gathered more comfort and

inspiration, than from reading of the easy successes of many other

fanciers.


I invariably keep a few Canaries as possible foster-parents for

chicks from British Finches, but Canaries have never yet obliged by

rearing a single chick of another species for me. Bullfinch, Linnet,

Siskin, Chaffinch, and Bunting eggs have been incubated by Canaries,

but the chicks have always been deserted within twenty-four hours of

hatching. This, of course, was more than half expected with regard

to the Chaffinch and Bunting.


All Chaffinches reared in my aviary were reared almost entirely

on earwigs, my Chaffinches would never feed on gentles to any extent.

The earwigs I obtained by placing dozens of discarded cotton garments

over a garden fence. When a garment was infested with earwigs,

I would drop the garment in a pail of hot water, and would get

thousands of earwigs this way, but, as other insect-eating birds were

in the same aviary, it was necessary to hang an extra nesting basket

in the alcove where the Chaffinches were nesting, The extra nesting

basket was used as a feeding pan, and only the nesting Chaffinches

were able to feed from this basket. The parent birds seemed to welcome

my interest in their nesting operations. I could examine the chicks

and the parent birds would continue to feed before I was out of the

aviary. Their joy was evident when a spider or a daddy-longlegs was



