Oo4 Townsend, Courtship in Birds. [July 



colors are for display and for conspicuousness as he is that black 

 is black and white is white. The speed with which the male dis- 

 cards his brilliant dress when the spring madness is over seems to 

 bear him out in this opinion. 



A recent writer 1 in ' The Auk' states his opinion, that the brilliant 

 colors and markings of the group of warblers "act as a uniform, 

 facilitating the recognition by a bird of its own kind just as they 

 facilitate its recognition by a bird student." How then does 

 he account for the fact that the females and young, who need 

 most to be identified, are most obscurely marked, and who can 

 doubt that birds can not only identify their own species with 

 ease no matter how poorly marked, but can pick out even their 

 own offspring from others? Does a Chinese woman have any 

 difficulty in recognizing her own offspring in a group of hundreds, 

 all similarly dressed and looking alike as peas to our untrained 

 eyes? Or, to bring the matter nearer home, watch a mother 

 enter a school-yard in which a hundred small children all of the 

 same age and dress are playing. She picks out her own child, 

 brushes its dress and wipes its nose with a perfect certainty of 

 conviction as to its identification, but if asked for the field marks, 

 is unable to give them. 



That the brilliant colors and markings of birds are of use in 

 courtship and that many of them are the slow result of sexual 

 selection seems to me to be a reasonable supposition because the 

 male bird in courtship always displays these colors and markings 

 to the best advantage. Where two or more males, as is often the 

 case, are eagerly doing their best in display it would seem natural 

 that the one who makes the most display is more likely to excite 

 and win the female. If this were not the case the display would 

 fall into innocuous desuetude. Mr. William Brewster once told 

 me the interesting case of a pair of Summer Tanagers in the south 

 where he shot the male. In a short time the female appeared 

 with another male. This one also he shot and so on until he 

 had obtained three or four of this female's spouses. On careful 

 examination of plumage it was seen that the most brilliant plum- 

 age was possessed by number one and that the brilliancy decreased 

 successively in the others. 



1 J. T. Nichols. Auk, 1912, XXXVI, P. 228. 



