BIRDS. 409 



sparrows. r \he smallest of all birds, namely., the humming- 

 bird, is one of the most quarrelsome. Mr. Gosse* describes 

 a battle in which a pair seized hold of each other's beaks, 

 and whirled round and round till they almost fell to the 

 ground; and M. Montes de Oca, in speaking of another 

 genus of humming-bird, says that two males rarely meet 

 without a fierce aerial encounter; when kept in cages " their 

 fighting has mostly ended in the splitting of the tongue of 

 one of the two, which then surely dies from being unable 

 to feed.'" f With Waders, the males of the common water- 

 lien (Gallinula chloropus) ''when pairing, fight violently 

 for the females; they stand nearly upright in the water and 

 strike with their feet." Two were seen to be thus engaged 

 for half an hour, until one got hold of the head of the 

 other, which would have been killed had not the observer 

 interfered; the female all the time looking on as a quiet 

 spectator.]; Mr. Blyth informs me that the males of an 

 allied bird ( i-iallicrex cristatus) are a third larger than the 

 females, and are so pugnacious during the breeding-season 

 that they are kept by the natives of Eastern Bengal for the 

 sake of fighting. Various other birds are kept in India for 

 the fjame purpose, for instance, the bulbuls (Pycnouotus 

 kceuiorr/iOKs) which " fight with great spirit." 



The polygamous ruff, Machetes pugnax (fig. 37), is 

 notorious for his extreme pugnacity; and in the spring, the 

 males, which are considerably larger than the females, con- 

 gregate day after day at a particular spot, where the females 

 propose to lay their eggs. The fowlers discover these spots 

 by the turf being trampled somewhat bare. Here they fight 

 very much like game-cocks, seizing each other with their 

 beaks and striking with their wings. The great ruff of 

 feathers round the neck is then erected, and according to 

 Col. Montagu " sweeps the ground as a shield to defend 

 the more tender parts;" and this is the only instance known 

 to me in the case of birds of any structure serving as a 

 shield. The ruff of feathers, however, from its varied and 



* Quoted by Mr, Gould, "Introduction to the Trochilidae," 1861, 

 p. 29. 



f Gould, ibid, p. 52. 



JW. Thompson, " Na* Hist, of Ireland; Birds," vol. ii, 1850, p. 

 327. 



, "Birds of ladia," 18G3, vol. ii, p. 96, 



