462 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



in it for six weeks or longer. I filled it after I saw the bird visit it, 

 and she came again to drink." 



The new bottles No. 5 and No. 6, covered like No. 4 with white 

 muslin and nailed to a weather-beaten fence picket, were put out after 

 dark on July 23, 1911, but neither was filled for one week. The next 

 morning about 8 o'clock a humming bird was searching one of these 

 bottles for suspected sweets; four such visits were noted in one day 

 and on several other occasions. At the end of the week the filling of 

 No. 5 began, but no sirup w^as put in No. 6 for two years. During 

 these years a record was kept of each time a humming bird was seen 

 to visit and search this unfilled bottle, and the total number was 15, 

 in addition to those visits already mentioned. 



Thus far this writing has been confined to a description of the 

 things seen ; no theories have been advanced, no deductions have been 

 made, no hypotheses have been carried to their logical conclusion. 

 The first deduction offered is that at the beginning of the experi- 

 ments, in 1907, the artificial nasturtium may have led the humming 

 bird to explore its depths, and, finding its contents to her taste, she 

 returned to it. Other birds may have found the sirup there in the 

 same way, yet it seems more likely that most of them were led to the 

 bottles by seeing another drinking. This probably was the case with 

 the catbirds that have drunk from the bottles on several occasions, 

 although they have found it an inconvenient performance. The same 

 may be true of a pair of chickadees that drank as long as they re- 

 mained with us. They clung to the stiff leaves of the tiger lily and 

 found no difficulty in the way of drinking. Only one humming bird 

 learned to perch on this flower and drink from it while standing. 

 From the earlier experiments it was suspected that the humming 

 birds found the sirup through some sense, rather than stumbling upon 

 it by chance or through imitation, but several things disprove such 

 a supposition. The principal one is that migrants passing through 

 the yard in the spring, but more especially in the fall, fail to find the 

 sirup. That these migrants can be recognized as such by their 

 behavior will be shown further on. 



The 25 or more visits paid to bottles No. 5 and No. 6 before they 

 were filled for the first time show that the birds recognized them as 

 receptacles for their food, though they were new bottles occupying 

 new locations. To make sure that the birds should not be attracted 

 to them by seeing me stake the pickets out, this work was done after 

 dark. The first summer that No. 6 was out, frequent pretenses of 

 filling it were made in sight of the birds, but no response followed. 

 The next summer no such pretenses were made, yet a humming bird 

 was seen to search this unfilled bottle on May 12 and 31, twice on 

 June 1, on July 21 and 26, on August 4, 7, 12, 23, and 26. 



