AUTUMN DISPLAYS IN OUR BRITISH BIRDS 26= 



AUTUMN DISPLAYS IN OUR BRITISH BIRDS. 



By Leonora Jeffrey Rintoul and Evelyn V. Baxter. 



MUCH has been written of the spring displays of many 

 of our British birds, and exact descriptions have been 

 penned of their courting antics, but we have been able to 

 find very little data respecting' the displays which frequently 

 take place in autumn and winter. Mr E. Selous, in his 

 book Bird- Watching, gives a vivid account of the autumn 

 antics of the Stone Curlew ; these are, he states, quite 

 different from the courting antics that take place in spring, 

 and he considers that this species has an autumn or social 

 display in contradistinction to its spring or sexual one (p. 14 

 et seq.). On p. 86 of the same work he gives a description 

 of a winter display by Dabchicks, this being, however, a 

 milder form of what takes place in spring. Mr Elliot 

 Howard, in his British Warblers, gives instances of display 

 by Sedge and Grasshopper Warblers in July ; these he 

 believes to be preliminaries to a second nest, and so they 

 fall into a different category from those we propose to 

 describe. Mr H. Wormald {British Birds (mag.), vol. iv., 

 p. 7) says : " One finds this autumn display in many birds ; 

 for instance, Blackcock repair to their playing grounds 

 and go through a half-hearted spring ' show ' so soon 

 as they have finished the moult. One often hears cock 

 Pheasants utter their spring-call followed by the character- 

 istic whirr of their wings in November. Snipe drum 

 freely during this month, just before dark, though I have 

 never heard a Snipe drumming in the daytime during 

 November." In The Scottish Naturalist, 191 2, p. 116, Mr 

 G. E. Brock describes the display of the Goosander, which 

 takes place from November onwards. In view of the fact 

 that so little seems to have been written on this subject, 

 we think it may be worth putting on record what we have 

 ourselves seen. 



