Page:The Common Birds of Bombay.djvu/134

118 kind of food that their constitutions require. They are like sailors fed on salt pork and ship's biscuit, who must have a little lime juice regularly, or else they will get scurvy. So these birds will get ill unless you supply them with living insects occasionally, and "Every Boy's Book" gives directions to juvenile bird-fanciers for breeding meal-worms and maggots. The "hard-billed" birds, on the contrary, need little else than good seed and fresh water, for that is their natural diet. For this reason the birds of that tribe are more commonly kept as pets. Of course there are many birds which do not fit quite neatly into either division. The Starling, for example, has not a very stout bill and will eat anything. But this difficulty meets every system of classification. Nature has not done birds up in bundles and labelled them, and on whatever principle we attempt to sort them, we soon find that there are many which seem to belong to one lot in some respects and to another lot in others. I have followed the arrangement adopted by Dr. Jerdon, as I said at the beginning, because his book is the only readable account of Indian birds which yet exists, and it is not likely to be superseded in our time. He divides the Conirostres, as far as India is concerned, into four families, the Crows, the Starlings, the Finches, and the Larks.

To begin with the first, there is surely little for me to say about the Common Crow. It speaks for itself. We all know enough about it. And yet this is not true, for in another sense we never know enough about it. The subject is inexhaustible. In any company in India, if conversation flags, bring the Crow upon the tapis and it will start into animation