THE HONEY-GUIDES 123 



heard the vic-tor call from any but adult males, Skead and Ranger 

 once watched two subadult (yellow-throated) birds giving this call 

 quite far from any Icnown call post. 



As mentioned in the discussion of courtship behavior, van Someren 

 refers to a "twittering" call by the male, and to a clicking noise made 

 by the female with its bill. 



On one occasion, when Ranger had placed a mounted specimen of a 

 male honey-guide in the favorite call post of the male we had been 

 watching, he noted that the bhd hopped around the mounted specimen 

 uttering a weak clucking note. 



That the vic-tor note is subject to some geographical variation is 

 indicated by the trisyllabic notation Myles North used to record it 

 at Makueni, Kenya Colony. He describes the note (in litt.) as a 

 "three-note call, repeated over and over again (often in series of seven, 

 then with a short pause before it begins again). It sounds like 

 whep-tew-irr in the rhythm of the phrase 'speak to me.' The first 

 note is an upward-slurred whistle, and the second and third are 

 trilled and sound much like the call of the kingfisher, Halcyon cheli- 

 cuti." North informs me that at Makueni the species is common, 

 and from September onwards, at least well into November, the song 

 of the male is one of the commonest sounds. The song is usually 

 given from a site at the top of a big acacia, such as Acacia spirocarpa, 

 but also occasionally from smaller trees or bushes. 



Pease (in Ogilvie-Grant, Reid, and Pease, 1901, p. 667) once saw a 

 greater honey-guide drumming like a woodpecker on a tree. This 

 observation is still unique and may not have been a drumming in the 

 woodpecker fashion but merely a matter of rapid pecking at some 

 propolis, unobserved by the reporter, in a crevice in the tree. 



Courtship and Mating 



It is a singular fact, the significance of which has remained generally 

 unappreciated, that in all the innumerable mentions of the greater 

 honey-guide in the literature there are no published observations on 

 this aspect of the birds' life history. Inasmuch as the courtship and 

 mating habits of birds are so frequently revealing in the sense of 

 explaining other parts of the annual cycle of behavior, and are so 

 intimately bound up with the breeding habits, it was one of my chief 

 hopes to learn something of them when I went to Africa. While I 

 was able to learn a good deal of the mating behavior, I never saw any 

 sign of courting. However, I am fortunate to be able to include the 

 following data supplied me by three experienced field men. 



Mr. John G. Williams, of the Coryndon Museum, Nairobi, observed 

 a display by this boney-guide near Morogoro, Tanganyika Territory, 

 in November 1948. In a line of trees along a road he noticed two 



