4 
6 
Some farmers consider that a nervous or excitable bird may be chased 
about to such a degree and so roughly handled at the time of clipping 
that its system does not recover from the shock for two or three months 
afterwards. It is therefore possible that in some instances rough handling 
during quilling is the explanation of an inferior crop of feathers. IF 96; 
it would emphasise the need for care in the handling of birds, and also 
for keeping the birds as tame as possible. The more frequently ostriches 
are collected and examined the less wild do they become. The explana- 
tion of rough handling would scarcely apply to cases where a whole flock 
produces an unusually inferior clipping; a farmer is not likely to handle 
his flock more roughly at one time than at another, while with odd birds 
this may be the case. 
The spiral nature of the sample 
feather here shown is such as one 
usually considers to result from 
careless quilling, but a suggestion 
of this nature could not be asso- 
ciated with such progressive 
farmers as Messrs. Rayner and 
Roberts, Tarka Bridge, from whom. 
the feathers were obtained, parti- 
cularly as all the feathers on both 
wings were of the same _ inferior 
type. In such a case there is every 
probability that the germs in the 
sockets have the power of recovery, 
and that the next clipping will 
consist of full perfect feathers. In 
connection with spiral plumes it 
may be mentioned that such often 
seem to result from feathers which 
in the process of growth do not 
properly overlap one another and 
thereby keep one another flat. Odd 
feathers, growing out of time, are 
frequently spiral through not hav- 
ing others adjacent to them. 
4. An InsurED Socket ContTINUES 
To Propuck MALFORMED 
FEATHERS. 
Among the number of whites 
or feminas met with on an 
HAD Luly leeewninseMntond Joni: ostrich are frequently found single 
tudinal defect or vertical bar on one side, Plumes which are malformed, 
This is the third feather of the kind pro- and consequently more or less 
duced from the same socket. valueless. Sometimes the feather 
from the one socket will 
be split into two imperfect feathers, or a rod-like growth may grow along 
with a more or less normal feather; Mr. Hougham Abrahamson, of 
Hougham Dale, has recently sent such a freak feather in which three im- 
perfect plumes have grown together from a single socket. A more familiar 
defect, however, is one in which the feather throughout its length ex- 
hibits an irregularity in the flue like that shown in the photograph (Fig. 
2). Such defects are sometimes described as vertical or longitudinal bars, 
