LONGEVITY OF BIRDS.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 800, 25 April 1910, Page 8

LONGEVITY OF BIRDS.

An instance was recorded in' a German paper recently of the shooting of a crow with a ring on its leg bearing a date of over a hundred years ago. In the same week a resident in one of the English counties wrote to the ornithological press putting ,on record the coming of age of his skylark. That letter brought to light the fact that if twenty-one. years is hot exactly a common age. for a lark, it is by no means a unique one. The ring on the German crow was no authentic chronicler of age, as there is no saying how or when it was placed there, but tlie writer has owned canaries that exceeded the twenty-one years of the skylark, and one bullfinch he : possessed reached the age of sixteen years. It is possible, too, that it would have lived longer but for-being over-fed one winter, and succumbing to fatty .degeneration. He has had a blackbird live ten years; a chaffinch eight, a linnet eleven, and another bullfinch nine, while six and seven years have been usual ages for his house and aviary-kept birds. Exhibition or "fancy" bred birds, on the other hand, are comparatively- short-lived, and the variety knoiyn as the "Scotch Fancy," the canary with the half-moon shaped body, is decrepit when' two or three years old, and is becoming . extinct—"The Scots-' man."