Chap. XIII.] LOVE-ANTICS. Go 



hot from the animal, so does his ear prefer his equally 

 coarse and discordant music to all other." 



Love-Antics and Dances. — The curious love-gestures 

 of various birds, especially of the Gallinacea3, have already 

 been incidentally noticed; so that little need here be 

 added. In Northern America, large numbers of a grouse, 

 the Tetrao phasianellus, meet every morning during the 

 breeding-season on a selected level spot, and here they 

 run round and round in a circle of about fifteen or twenty 

 feet in diameter, so that the ground is worn quite bare, 

 like a fairy-ring. In these Partridge-dances, as they are 

 called by the hunters, the birds assume the strangest atti- 

 tudes, and run round, some to the left and some to the 

 right. Audubon describes the males of a heron (Ardea 

 herodias) as walking about on their long legs with great 

 dignity before the females, bidding defiance to their rivals. 

 With one of the disgusting carrion-vultures (Cathartes 

 jota) the same naturalist states that "the gesticulations 

 and parade of the males at the beginning of the love-sea- 

 son are extremely ludicrous." Certain birds perform 

 their love-antics on the wing, as we have seen with the 

 black African weaver, instead of on the ground. During 

 the spring our little white-throat {Sylvia cinerea) often 

 rises a few feet or yards in the air above some bush, and 

 " flutters with a fitful and fantastic motion, singing all the 

 while, and then drops to its perch." The great English 

 bustard throws himself into indescribably odd attitudes 

 while courting the female, as has been figured .by Wolf. 

 An allied Indian bustard ( Otis Bengalensis) at such times 

 " rises perpendicularly into the air with a hurried flapping 

 of his wings, raising his crest and puffing out the feathers 

 of his neck and breast, and then drops to the ground ; " 

 he repeats this manoeuvre several times successively, at 

 the same time humming in a peculiar tone. Such females 



