W. Goodfellow—Familiar Birds of Singapore



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will give an idea how fearless these birds are. They are olive-brown

in colour, much lighter underneath, the head black and white and,

of course, the undertail coverts yellow as the name implies. A specimen

has been on view in a cage in the Bird House, Regent’s Park, for some

years now, one of two hand-reared from a nest near the Naval Base.


Bulbuls of all kinds are extremely easy to hand-rear, and will

repay anyone who appreciates a tame bird, and they can then be

given quite a large amount of liberty in suitable localities. As a very

young man in Morocco, I reared several of the White-vented species,

P. barbatus, common along North Africa, and one of these lived for

twenty years. For the first year at least it had a pure white tail with

black tips, which I was hoping it would retain, but in due course it

moulted out to the normal dark colour. Malay name for the Yellow-

vented is “ Merbat ”.


It would not do to miss from the list of familiar birds the Necklace

Dove ( Streptopelia tigrina), common throughout a large part of the

Malay Archipelago, and to be seen on most house-tops, and in most

yards and gardens. The Javanese produce queer hybrids sometimes

from this Dove, and albinism is not uncommon, so I am surprised that

a white variety has not been established. I have also seen one melanoid

bird. It is a fairly favourite cage-bird with the Malays, but far exceeded

in this respect by the smaller Barred Ground Dove (Geopelia striata).

I think it would be impossible to find a Malay home that did not keep

at least one of them, most have several, always in the same style of

cage wherever you go—a round bamboo cage with a domed top,

partially covered with red calico, and open bars on the bottom. Its

only note is a “ Coo ” repeated several times in succession, but if a

bird is discovered which goes one better, a fairly large price is paid

for it. I don’t know if it is still the case, but a few years ago the craze

for this spread to non-Malays also, and I saw several which changed

hands at prices ranging from 120 to 200 Straits dollars. I know one

man who had the craze, and he even sent up to Penang to buy birds of

note he had heard of there. They came to the dealers’ shops in Singapore

in cages containing perhaps a hundred birds ; here Malays will squat for

hours on end waiting for a bird to give an extra “ Coo ” or extra frequent

repetition, or perhaps to hear the quality of the voice. Each man has a



