100 BULLETIN 208, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



vibrating up and down very rapidly." The next day Ranger re- 

 visited the call site and found M and C still repeating the above 

 behavior. However, on the following day and the next, only C was 

 to be seen at the call site, and giving the normal guttural, purring 

 "song." 



In this connection, another recent discovery by Ranger may be 

 described, a display reaction apparently relative to the appearance of 

 another individual. This he observed twice, on August 24 and 

 September 9. When he gave the whistle-call in response to that made 

 by the bird, it came into view about 15 yards off in a flitting, hovering 

 manner, rising up to a perch. 



The movement is a fluttering, halting hovering which begins on a lower level 

 than the perch the bird eventually takes up, and about 6 feet from it. The 

 attitude of the bird is similar to that of a nectar-feeding bird hovering before a 

 flower ... I am under the impression that the birds uttered the whistle-call 

 during the hovering movement but am not certain on this point . . . The 

 whistle-call, however, was made from the perch upon the bird's alighting there 

 from the hovering rise, and the protest trill as well in the case of September 9. 

 This hovering movement is not a stationary hovering before the perch, but a 

 hovering progression to the perch. 



Corroborative observations of call-post behavior in this species 

 come to me from Darrell C. H. Plowes (in litt.). In July, at Mtunzuni 

 in the coastal belt of Zululand, he and a friend watched a male (?) 

 variegated honey-guide calling from a certain tree for quite a long 

 time, and his friend informed him that the bird was to be heard calling 

 from that tree at almost all times of the year. A few days later Plowes 

 found another similar instance in the Ngoye forest. 



Seasonal Movements and Site Tenacity 



The scaly-throated honey-guide is nonmigratory and has been the 

 subject of so little observation (and that little so casual) everywhere 

 except in the Umtaleni Valley that the published records of birds seen 

 or collected give no information as to any local wanderings. Ranger's 

 observations show definitely that singing birds (presumably males) 

 have definite call sites from which they give their curious croaking song 

 hour after hour, day after day, for months on end, in fact, almost 

 throughout the year. He has known of three such sites that have been 

 in fairly regular occupancy by this species from 1925 to 1952, and one 

 of which, definitely known to be used since 1942, still is in use at the 

 time of present writing. This suggests site tenacity, at least on the 

 part of the singing males, but we have still to determine the extent to 

 which the same individual clings to the call post, and whether the 

 "stud post" behavior described for /. indicator actually occiu-s in this 

 species as well. The implications are that the picture here is probably 

 essentially .similar^to that in /. indicator, although differing from the 



