voy: The Instinct of Migration. 8r 
after resting for a few minutes off they would start again, as though 
migrating from the south to the northern breeding grounds. At 
the times of seasonal migration, the grosbeaks were apparently 
able to see fully as well at night as in the day time, it making no 
difference in their uneasy flight if they were covered up in total 
darkness in the house. By the middle of September following they 
again showed the disposition to migrate as before, which lasted from 
three to four weeks, and at the end of this time they began to settle 
down quietly as though the flight southward had ended. Their fore- 
heads by this time were bare of all feathers from continual beating 
against the cage wires. 
On March 3, 1887, the migratory movement set in again; this 
season-they would often break forth in short bars of their song as 
one may hear the free birds in summer at the first dawning of day. 
I find that the desire to migrate is of shorter duration in the 
spring with these grosbeaks than in the fall. This fact leads me to 
believe that on moving southward in the fall the wild bird is not as 
liable to be overtaken by stormy weather as in the spring migration, 
and the desire of reaching the winter home is not as strong as that 
when coming northward to reach the breeding home. 
I lost one of these males in December, 1888, but the lone gros- 
beak showed the same inclination to migrate as early as February 
28, 1889, and even began to sing; this I accounted for by the warm 
open winter of 1888-9. By eight o’clock in the evening he would 
begin to wake up as if from a dream; he sang a few notes, then hop- 
ped back and forth along the perches, calling pee-éep, pee-écp. If 
I whistled in reply to him he would answer back. 
I added a female to the grosbeak’s cage in June, 1889, and when 
she had completed her fall plumage, September 20, she began to 
show the migratory instinct by flying wildly about the cage, from 
eight to nine o'clock in the evening only. The female seemed to 
show the disposition to start southward much stronger than the male 
did. She would sometimes strike the wires so hard that I expected 
to find her dead some morning. The whole top of her head soon 
became bare of feathers. _ 
It would seem as though these birds, having been. brought up 
from nestlings, would have lost more or less of that wild trait that 
we look for and see in the wild birds, but each spring and fall they 
_ exhibit the same peculiarities. 
