EASTERN SHARP-TAILED SPARROW 799 



known reason the Sharp-tail is not ubiquitous. There vsdll be a 

 colony here and there along the bank of some tidal creek when, for 

 all you can see, the Sharp-tails might just as well as not be up and 

 down the entire length of the creek." Counts of such colonies I have 

 made at Plum Island, Barnstable, Monomoy, and Dartmouth, Mass., 

 and Tiverton, R.I., show they may contain 3 to 15 pairs with a 

 density of 1 to 1.5 pairs per acre, and the colonies may be a half mile to 

 a mile apart. At Barnstable the total number, the sum of many such 

 colonies, is about 1,000 pairs (Hill, 1965). Breeding birds with which 

 they are associated include American bittern, black duck, marsh 

 hawk, clapper rail, and seaside sparrow. Savannah sparrow and 

 meadowlark areas fringe on the sharp-tails, and several species each 

 of gulls, terns, and swallows are overhead. 



Territory and courtship. — The sharp-tailed sparrow apparently 

 does not establish a breeding territory in the usual sense of the term. 

 In his study of banded birds in a New Jersey marsh, Woolfenden 

 (1956) found that "Marking made it evident that the males were not 

 territorial, although they did confine themselves to what might 

 appropriately be called a breeding home range, the area to which an 

 individual confines itself in the course of one nesting attempt. Ob- 

 servations of marked birds also indicated that there was considerable 

 overlap of the breeding home ranges of individual males." He 

 estimated that each male ranged over about four acres, none of which 

 he actually defended, and that the individual females restricted them- 

 selves to less than one acre in the vdcinity of the nest. This, and the 

 relative reticence and stealthy actions of the nesting females, largely 

 account for the apparent unbalanced sex ratio of three or four males 

 to one female observed by Montagna (1940) in Maine and by my own 

 random collecting in Massachusetts during the nesting season. 



Reflecting this comparative lack of territoriality, the species ap- 

 parently has little if any special courtship behavior. Montagna 

 (1942a) noted occasional fighting between males in Virginia (so de- 

 termined by collecting the fighting pair), which he assumed were 

 "over a female." In his observations on subvirgata in Maine, the same 

 author (1940) noted that "Male birds, as many as three, were seen 

 crowding over one female, perhaps attempting to copuhite. * * * 

 Repeatedly birds were seen copulating immediately after the males' 

 descent from the song flight." At Barnstable, Mass., I have several 

 times seen a male simply fly to a female feeding on the mud and 

 copulate without any preliminary display. The female squatted and 

 partially spread her wings as the male mounted her back uith flutter- 

 ing wings for a brief moment and consummated the act. As Woolfen- 

 den (1956) remarked, this species is "promiscuous, relations between 

 the sexes being limited to copulation." 



646-737— 6S—pt. 2 14 



