Abstract
Insectivorous birds have always been considered to be relatively difficult birds to feed well in capitivity. Since many of them are excellent singers, most of them become very tame and attached to their owners, and most of them show decided personality, many bird fanciers have made an attempt at keeping them.
I first kept warblers and other small insectivorous birds in the late 1930s. I found that about half a dozen was as many as I could care for properly by the methods considered ideal at that time.
A few acquaintances in the neighborhood kept softbilled birds and we used to exchange views and experiences. We all fed our birds in much the same way. The local bird shop supplied an insectile mixture considered to be of superior quality. It was certainly expensive. We raised mealworms. We could buy blowfly maggots in convenient quantities at a fishing tackle shop in town, and we used to devote an unconscionable amount of our leisure time to collecting ants' eggs, wasp grubs and other live food in the surrounding countryside. Those of us who kept thrushes, starlings and similar large softbills knew how to economize by mixing the insectile food with a fine grade of puppy meal. Most of our birds thrived very well on this treatment. Others did well for a time but did not last very long.
In those days I had no idea that insectivorous birds had been kept with comparable success but by entirely different methods at least from the time of the
Roman Empire, as we know from the Roman writers Varro and Pliny. Varro himself had a splendid aviary which housed nightingales among other songbirds. Pliny describes a white nightingale bought at a fabulous price and presented to Agrippina, mother of the Emperor Nero. He also mentions nightingales taught to utter phrases in Greek and Latin and presented as rare gifts to the Emperor's children. Unfortunately, neither Varro nor Pliny tells us how the nightingales were fed.
The earliest work I have seen gives specific instructions for feeding insectivorous birds is Cesare Mancini's Ammaestramenti ... The first edition (which I have not seen) is dated 1575. My copy is dated 1645.
Mancini seems to have kept nightingales, wrens, rock thrushes, songthrushes, European blackbirds, blackcaps and larks - all species noted for their excellence as song birds. Apparently, he fed them on raw beefheart, hard-boiled eggs, and a dry crumb that was destined to degenerate over the centuries into a food called German paste and to be revived and improved out of recognition in our century as gamebird starter, turkey starter or mynah bird food. Mancini gives no evidence of knowing how to raise mealworms, but recommends the worms found in pigeon lofts, which may have been mealworms.
Crude to the point of brutality as these diets were, they nevertheless retained their popularity for three hundred years and had articulate advocates recommending
their use. For example, we have the Rev. William Floyd Cornish saying in a letter dated 1826 that he had been successful in keeping whitethroats and other softbilled birds on "beef, mutton, veal or lamb, not overdressed, cut very small and mixed with hard eggs, yellow as well as white, and a little chopped hemp seed, on which they have thriven very well." Also, rather later, in 1832, a Mr. Cox exhibited a nightingale to members of the London Zoological Society; he had kept it for four years; it was in full song. In the Arcana of Science, Mr. Cox expressed his opinion that failure with nightingales and "other Sylviadae" was often due to over-elaborate feeding. He used finely ground meat and hardboiled egg and considered insects by no means necessary.
I have mentioned crushed hemp seed as an item of diet for insectivorous birds. It seems an odd choice, but nevertheless has long been a popular one. An anonymous writer condemned its use for nightingales and starlings in 1697. It must have been a usual item in his day.
Robert Sweet's charming book on British warblers, which was issued in parts from 1823 to 1832, warmly advocated the use of hemp seed; it recommends a staple diet of scalded and crushed hemp seed and bread beaten to a moist paste. Robert Sweet considers insects, fresh or dried, to be essential. Like most other old writers, he advocates the meat and egg, but the egg only as an occasional change. He emphasizes the point that grit also is needed by these birds, and that warblers will not long remain in health without it. It is obvious from his remarks that it was the lime content of the grit that his birds needed most.
If I had known anything about these old writers back in the 1930s, I should certainly have written off their recipes for bird food as barbaric archaisms. I was all for Natural Feeding.
Of course, the limitations to natural feeding were already familiar to me at that time. I had learned as a small boy that a single nestling can consume insects far faster than an average person can collect them by hand.
We have all come a long way since the 1930s. We think of food in terms of calories, proteins, vitamins, minerals, and so on to a degree that would have astounded earlier generations. The shortcomings of the earlier diets are plain to see. We no longer imagine that live insects contain some mysterious vital factor that is essential to keep insectivorous birds in health. If a food is nutritionally balanced the birds should thrive on it, no matter what it is made from. That is the theory.