336



Lord Tavistock—Breeding Results for 1937



If you get rid of it she may lay again.” So I broke the egg, which con¬

tained a living chick due to hatch in a day or two ! Owing to the hen’s

unsteady sitting during the early days, the period of incubation was not

up as I thought. X went off chuckling and duly finished the episode

by inducing the bereaved mother to start behaving for some time as if

she meant to lay again, only in the end to do nothing but moult !


The other lutino sister paired to the normal cock likewise got

egg-bound but sat all right when returned to the aviary, hatching three

out of four eggs and rearing three good greens, two of which, however,

unfortunately died in the autumn.


The two-year-old son of this hen, paired to the wild lutino, provided

one of the best results of the season—two very nice lutinos and a green.

I am hoping that one of the young yellows may prove to be a cock as it

seems to have rather a darker iris than its companion.


The green hen paired to the old and scrubby lutino-bred cock

also got egg-bound but sat steadily. She hatched two eggs, one of her

own and one of a Crimson-wing, but reared neither young one. I do

not think she fed the Crimson-wing on account of its white down,

and her own young one, which may have been weakly, only survived a

short time.


The last of the lutino hens, which did well for a time in an aviary,

ultimately developed a recrudescence of the swelling and discharge be¬

low the eye. I sent her to the Veterinary College, where the trouble was

diagnosed as tubercular and she was ultimately destroyed. I have never

known a bird to suffer so long from a local tubercular infection without

the slightest injury to its general health or a spreading of the disease

throughout the system. The lutino was already infected when I first

received her from India more than a year ago. The disease fortunately

was not transmitted to her companion, the 1936 lutino-bred, who

remains perfectly well.


Plumheads were a complete failure. They are, in my experience,

the hardest of all Parrakeets to rear to healthy maturity and others

have had a similar bad luck with them.


A green hen bred from lutinistic parents and paired to a normal

cock hatched three young but lost one after a few days. The remainder

succumbed some time later, but may have been killed by black ants which



