280 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



pairing- time. Boundless desire, and consequently excessive jealousy, 

 imperious demands submissively acceded to, mad wooing readily 

 accepted, and thereafter complete indifference towards each other, 

 are the main characteristics of the intercourse between the sexes of 

 these birds. These explain, too, the fact that among them much 

 oftener than among other birds crossing takes place, and mongrels 

 or hybrids are produced, which lead a miserable existence, and 

 either pine away without progeny, or, by mating with the true 

 offspring of the race, lead back to the type again. Cross-pairing 

 does indeed occur among other, that is monogamous, birds, but only 

 when the absence of a mate of their own species impels them to 

 seek one of another; whereas among polygamous birds chance and 

 tempting opportunity seem as determinative as such a dilemma. 



It may be necessity, the absolute necessity of providing for the 

 brood just hatched or still slumbering within the egg, which compels 

 the female of monogamous birds to change her widowhood for a 

 new alliance more quickly than the male can console himself for the 

 loss of his wife. Whether her grief is really less than the widower's 

 may be doubted, emphatically against her though appearances are. 

 Other female birds act exactly like the stork on the Ebensee. A 

 pair of magpies brooding in our garden were to be killed because 

 we feared for the safety of the numerous singing-birds which we 

 protected and encouraged in the same garden. At seven o'clock in 

 the morning the male bird was shot, and barely two hours later the 

 female had taken another mate; in an hour he too fell a victim; at 

 eleven o'clock the female had contracted a third alliance. The same 

 thing would have occurred again, but that the alarmed female, with 

 her last-annexed mate, flew away from the garden. One spring my 

 father shot a cock partridge; the hen flew up, but soon alighted 

 and was immediately wooed by another cock, whom she accepted 

 without more ado. Tchusi-Schmidthofen took away no fewer than 

 twenty males from the nest of a black redstart within eight days, 

 and only then left the twenty- times widowed and just as often 

 consoled bird to the undisturbed enjoyment of her connubial bliss. 



Exactly the opposite of such apparent inconstancy is seen in the 

 case of a male bird that has lost his mate. Screaming loudly, com- 



