Cage-birds. Birds have been kept from the earliest history of the world to the present time by savage as well as by civilised races, and the origin of caging and domesticating birds as pets is lost in antiquity. Alexander the Great kept a ring-necked parrakeet in a golden cage of fabulous value; and these birds still bear the name of the famous Greek emperor. Steam and colonisation have led to the regular importation into Britain of not less than 50,000 foreign cage-birds every year, and as many of these varieties breed freely in England, our native songsters are less sought after as pets except by the poorer class. Not that any of these brilliantly plumaged foreigners can compare in song with several of our more sober-coated little songsters—the British blackbird, the thrush, or the skylark. There is now a craze for foreign bird-breeding, and Australian and American parrakeets nestle freely in large cages or garden aviaries, burrowing into logs of rotten wood, making no nests, and laying their eggs in the holes. They stand our winters well if supplied with abundance of suitable food—viz. canary, hemp, millet, and oats for aviaries; and canary only in cages, where want of exercise produces excessive fatness and egg-binding. Of the foreign cage-birds, the best songsters are the shama (Copsychus saularis, an Indian bird of the thrush family), bulbul, Virginian nightingale (of which the hen sings quite as well as the male bird), and the American mocking-bird. Amongst English soft-billed songsters the most desirable are the nightingale, blackcap, blackbird, thrush, lark, and starling; these all have to be fed on crushed hemp and bread-crumbs, with animal food in the shape of meat or insects—spiders being a wonderful ‘pick-me-up’ for these birds when out of health. Of the grain-eating British birds kept for their song, linnets and goldfinches head the list; but the bullfinch is deservedly popular, for he is very handsome in his crimson breast and black velvet coat, and he is essentially of a knowing, jolly disposition, although his call-note is somewhat monotonous. He can easily be taught to whistle a tune if the lesson is begun before he is old enough to be in full song. Siskins and redpolls are the unfortunate birds which a certain class of people delight to chain to a bucket-board by means of a belt or brace, and doom to draw their water and food from wells beneath by means of miniature buckets. Goldfinches and linnets are sometimes similarly treated, but happily this cruel practice—like the ‘blearing’ of birds’ eyes with a hot iron to make them sing better—is rightly discontenanced.
Broadly speaking, the ailments which afflict all cage-birds are in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred due to injudicious and excessive feeding, and it is far better to err on the side of short commons than to feed too high. As the sicknesses of the birds owe their origin to insufficient exercise and too much stimulating food, the safest and most universal medicine is a drop of castor-oil, put into the patient’s mouth with a camel-hair brush. Artificially heated rooms and the fumes of gas are very deleterious to bird-life, and glass conservatories, by reason of their varying heat, are unsuitable places either for aviaries or cages. To hang a bird in a window, or to place an aviary cage there, is gross cruelty, because a draught is even more injurious to birds than to human beings; and pets kept under such conditions are always in bad health and wheezy.
The best parrot for talking purposes is the double-fronted, yellow-faced Amazon (Chrysotis ochro- cephala), which is much harder than the African gray birds, of which latter species more than ninety-five per cent. die in the process of acclimatisation. There are two varieties of grays—small from the south coast, and a larger kind from the west of Africa; these latter are the best. The spring of the year is the proper season to buy a parrot, as the young birds are then imported, and there is the whole summer and autumn in which to harden them off. The cockatoo family are all crested, and in some varieties the crests are fan-shaped, and can be opened or closed at will. These birds make noisy cage-pets, being querulous and excitable, and they never make good talkers. Canary-seed is the best staple article of diet for all the parrot tribe, both large and small.