HWAMEI

The Hwamei (leucodioptron canorum, formerly garrulax canorus) was once amongst the most popularly kept songbirds in my country, until their availability was greatly affected by the restrictions imposed on this species. Most Singaporeans today live in flats and the popularity decline could also be partly due to the fact that the hwamei is too loud to be kept in these homes without sometimes annoying other family members as well as neighbours.

The ones commonly kept here is the nominate subspecies, leucodioptron canorum canorum. They are native to southern China and Indochina. There is another subspecies, leucodioptron canorum owstoni, native to the Hainan island. The Taiwanese hwamei, leucodioptron taewanum is now considered a separate species. In Taiwan, introduced l. canorum hybridises with the native species of l. taewanum. The Taiwanese species is now classified as "Near Threatened" by Birdlife International largely due to the extent of hybridisation with the mainland species (http://www.birdlife.org/datazone/species/index.html?action=SpcHTMDetails.asp&sid=32317&m=0).
The native Taiwanese species do not have the white eye-brows and are generally inferior to the mainland species in terms of song qualities. Some of the hybridised specimens have shortened white eye brows in comparison to the mainland species.

Hwameis are omnivorous but I also consider them to be facultative insectivores because they feed mainly on insects during the crop season when these are in abundance. After the crop season, they will switch to feeding on plant seeds. They are quite often described in published journals and articles by foreign authors to be also feeding on fruits found on the forest ground, a description that I think is quite frequently used for most ground feeding thrushes. From my understanding of a research paper done on the crop contents of this species and from what I had learned from good old-timer bird keepers from China, I had formed the opinion that fruits do not constitute a significant portion in the diet of the hwamei in the wild.

In captivity, non-breeding hwameis are known to do quite well on dry pellets formulated from grains and chicken feed, supplemented with live insects. Besides chicken feed, unpolished rice fried in egg yolks were also used in the past to feed this species and quite possibly could also be included as part of the recipes of the commercial pellets formulated for the hwamei here today. Unlike the shamas, they are not fussy eaters and most newly wild caughts will readily feed on the commercial pellets or plain chicken feed without much need to train them to do so. A chicken feed based dry food supplemented with live insects daily seems to be a close match to its natural wild diet. Unlike in the west, hwameis here are traditionally not given fruits as part of their diet. I would think that the people who had passed down the methods of feeding the captive hwamei to us here, knew the bird well enough, for it is afterall a native species of the land from which they had came from.