CAGE-BIRDS AT THE CRYSTAL PALACE.
ONE thousand and sixty-three Cage-Birds, British and Foreign, comprising seventy-seven classes, form a very dainty dish to set before the public at the appropriate St. Valentine season, with the accompaniments of bright sunshine and immense quantities of spring flowers, so arranged that the Show looks like a Bird City, with a brilliant garden suburb, and a great floral pyramid for its Hotel de Ville. Its outlying works are patent galvanised wire cages for parrots, cunningly constructed to circumvent the mischievous, not to say burglarious ingenuity of Polly, with spring hasps to the doors, and troughs so secured with screws and nuts that she can- not unship her dinner equipage and make an hors d'tsiwre of the hooks. These guard the entrance to the great tent in the north nave, and are prettily beset with pots of hyacinth, snow- drops, and lilies of the valley. Sweet sounds pervade the Bird City, short twitters, shrill musical whistles, abrupt, brief bursts of song ; but there is no din such as prevailed during the Poultry Show, and the gentle rustling of wings makes a music all its own, as ceaseless as the murmurous cooing of the doves. Foremost in rank and greatest in number are the Canaries, the Clear Yellows and the Buffs, the evenly marked Yellows and Buffs, the " ticked " or unevenly marked Yellows and Buffs, the Cinnamon, the Crested, the Belgians, the Lizards, and the " Mealy London Fancy," the latter a new class, for which a more euphonious name might have been found. What beautiful creatures they are, from the proud winner of the first prize, a strong, broad-headed, thin- limbed bird, with feathers of surpassing sleekness as yellow as a guinea, all innocent of saffron, and a sweet, piercing note, to the pert little fellow with a crest, very like the fashionable coiffure, a tousled top, and a fringe above the eyes which has been accidentally pushed a little too far. How wonderfully various they are ! As one passes along the line, objecting to the fancy cages whose gaudy colours injure the pure delicate effect of the plumage of their inmates, and afford the little creatures neither shelter nor rest, for they swing and twirl with the lightest touch of the tiny talons, and are horribly suggestive of a tread- mill for bird convicts, one recognises the slight differences, and finds that there is no absolute similarity between any two of the number. On the whole, they are not noisy, considering the sun- shine, and the visitors, and that one canary in a drawing-room will generally pierce the ears of friends who propose to themselves a confidential talk, and will require to be persuaded, by having his cage covered, that it is bed - time. Their restlessness is wonderful ; not one of them is still for an instant,—a sign that they are all in health. The majority of the cages are perfectly adapted for their health and comfort, having solid sides and roof, the inside painted white, the outside and the prison bars in front, black, so that the yellow, and the buff, the deeper, lighter, and variegated shades all down the long lines are thrown up by this arrangement of colour. Among the " ticked " birds are some with very beautiful caprices of the plumage. One has a coquettish little flat cap marked upon his smooth yellow poll, another a bistre shade around his black eyes which softens away their beadiness, the closed wings of a third form the Cress of Saint Andrew in dark feathers just above his tail.
The Belgian canaries are not handsome birds ; they are indeed prized for their ugliness, which consists in a lean form, limp feathers of pale hue, and a development about the shoulders resembling a hump, so that as they sit in a falcon-like attitude upon their perches, their legs are quite straight, and their backs hunched and rounded out. They are delicate birds, hard to rear, and they all look old and careworn, unlike the merry Lizards and the stout lumpish Yorkshires—quite the John Brodies of Canary- dom,—which probably weigh a whole ounce each, and are formed into a competing class for the first time on this occasion. The finches or seed-eating birds are largely in the majority ; the display of bullfinches, goldfinches, and mules is quite bewildering. Between these brilliant little creatures, and the strange bright birds from Africa, South America and Australia, the avenues of the Bird City suggest the jewellers' quarter of an Oriental bazaar. Tiny wings flash with a score of colours, round eyes glitter like separate gems, here are beaks of coral, of opal, of mother-of-pearl, of purest amber ; glancing slender necks moving with incalculable smooth swiftness within delicate rings of ruby or amethyst, of garnet, carbuncle, emerald, or sapphire ; soft breasts swelling with a pearly sheen over the rapidly beating hearts whose throbs always seem so disproportionate in their strength to the creatures' weak- ness. Here is a whole series of gorgeous mites, dainty and delicate as the cunningest goldsmith's work, hopping about in the hue of every jewel in mine, or river, or ravine ; " Java " sparrows, from Africa, in coral red, in velvet black, in mottled grey and white ; a Virginian nightingale, which is not a nightingale at all, but a beautiful, glowing creature, with a short plume of brilliant feathers like the agrafe of Henri III. ; a Cardinal Bird, with fine head, stately tread, and scarlet cap ; a pair of "graceful doves," their eyes apparently set in a fine rim of torquoise enamel ; and a beauti- ful pair of Barbary doves, the female watching her mate with mild eyes, while he, to tell the truth, is looking about him. Here are " Cut-throats," the male with a murderous red mark round his soft neck, the female without it; wondrously lovely little Waxbills; and Love Birds whispering together, quite undisturbed in theirsoli- Jude-à-deux by the presence of visitors from a world in which honey- moons are in process of abolition. Here are innumerable parakeets, —Mr. Jamrach imports them by thousands—with warm flashes from the Australian skies yet upon their wings, with pale blue or opaline beaks, and hidden treasures of colour about them, disclosed with each movement. It is strange to think of the lonely, vast places whence these bright creatures come, of the awful, desolate tracts, the changeless trees, the wealth-laden, solitary earth, with many a secret yet close hidden, notwithstanding the wide-spread rifling of its breast, over which their silent flight has passed. Here is a splendid Australian parrot, with dazzlingly brilliant scarlet head and breast, with wings of green, from pale tendre to the richest Badakshan emerald, and a beak like polished jade ; he bites his sage viciously ; he is a strong bird. Where did they catch him? What had he seen? Could he tell as anything of the story of that ghastly mummy upstairs, in the Australasian collection, which hangs by its waistbelt across the arm of a tree, exactly as it hung in the bush swinging lonely in the dry air, for twenty months after it had been shot as a " black fellow," one of a murderous party, renowned in the annals of slaughter ? This gorgeous bird, and a neighbour of his in a green and yellow livery, with patches of scarlet lace about it, look contemptuously wise. They know a thing or two about nuggets, no doubt, and have had quite other experiences than those of the sleek and gentlemanly grey parrot (No. 890) near them, who calls " Bobbie!" mews like the cat with whom he lives in harmony upon their common hearth-rug, and is tame, gentle, and respectable. No. 893 is also a grey parrot, highly educated, but not so refined in his talk. He lays his sleek, powdery-looking head against the rails of his cage, and says authoritatively to people in general, " Paddle your own canoe ;" then, finding that this admonition, intended, no doubt, as an equivalent for " Move on," is ineffectual, he asks, " What's the row ?" Ultimately, he thinks he may as well make the best of it, and be hospitable, so he says affably to the nearest visitor, "Will you smoke ?" In the vicinity of these delightful creatures are several apparently patriarchal cockatoos, arrayed in the fashion- able shades, cream-colour and pink ; some preternaturally shrewd magpies—one of Australian origin, who has probably picked the secret of the nuggets out of the parrots, and since buried the gold- s conversational starling, who has enlarged his vocabulary since Mr. Sterne's time ; an Australian piping crow, with an almost aquiline nobility about him; and an exquisitely beautiful Blue-bird, in which one instantly recognises Prince Charming. Here are eleven nightingales, silent, watchful little fellows, in brown duffle coats, quiet on their perches, like opera-singers with their mufflers on, taking care of their throats ; here is a Mussel-thrush, a rare, shy bird ; is he not the very identical thrush who wiled away the old monk with his singing for a hundred years, and breathed a note of his own melody into Longfellow's legend of that rapt fol- lowing? One looks for Prince Camaralzaman's bird next, and finds him in a gorgeous Lory, who now wears the tantalising talisman set in his flaming breast. Here is the lark — Shakespeare's and Shelley's—with a few inches of his native sod under his impri- soned feet ; and, one of the greatest curiosities of the Show, a brown blackbird, the abnormal colour contrasting much less favourably with the keen yellow beak than the ordinary lustrous black.
Here are hawfinches,—with the strong thick bank of their tribe, stronger and thicker in their case, that it may smash the hard haws which they eat,—busily fulfilling their destiny in that respect, crunching their Christmas cheer vigorously. Here are tits, with the fine blade-beak of the insectivorous tribes catching their meal- worms dexterously under their claws, cutting them up and eating them in sections. Here, solitary, fierce, brooding, far back on his perch, is the migratory shrike. How malign and hawk-like he looks, with his watchful, angry eye, his head sunken in his neck-feathers, and his curved, cruel beak ! He would be obliged if the attendants would accommodate him with a cage full of tits, a few goldfinches, or a canary or two, alive, mind you, that he might tear them to pieces and devour them, for he is a cannibal bird, and although he does not mind mice in hard times, would always prefer the songsters of the grove.
In an elevated position at the farthest extremity of the Bird City there is a most ingenious contrivance. It is a cage in the shape of a house, composed of two rooms, beautifully made of innumerable little pieces of inlaid wood, arranged in a pretty pattern. Attached to this is a cylindrical musical box, which is worked by the little inmate of the cage, a beautiful goldfinch, who takes great delight in the quite voluntary performance.
The Bird Show is a beautiful spectacle. Among the spectators on last Saturday were many of the free and happy birds who live in the Crystal Palace. It was strange enough to hear them twittering, to see them perching at their idle will high up among the Christmas banners, or on the pedestals and shrubs, or to watch them on their swift swaying flight from wall to wall over the canvas of the Bird City, and away into the sunshine and the free air.
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