COUNTRY LIFE.
More Weights of Birds ...
On this page, a year ago, I made a short list of the weights of some common birds taken almost at random from the pages of that Victorian bird-lover, the Rev. F.O. Morris. Apparently a great many people had, like myself, never_ considered the question of the weights of birds, and the list astonished. Many correspondents apparently could forget the fact that a tit's weight was reckoned in drachms and that a heron, with a wing-span in the full grown bird of five feet, weighed only three pounds. A well-known publisher, spending his holiday in the Scilly Islands, wrote asking for the weights of various sea-birds. I give a list of these in the next paragraph. Meanwhile it may interest him and others to have more proof of the extreme fragility of small birds. A yellow-hammer weighs seven drachms ; a grey wagtail five drachms. A swift, rather surprisingly, weighs nearly an ounce. A cuckoo, not surprising to anyone who has seen a young cuckoo being fed, goes slightly over a quarter of a pound. A peewit weighs half a pound, a tree pipit nearly six drachms, a greenfinch eight drachms, a corn-bunting nearly two ounces-. A tree creeper has the record, I think, with a weight of two drachms.
In alccases the weight is that of the male bird. ,
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