1907.] "bleating" OF THE SNIPE. 13 



that Snipe produced their bleating notes, not through the vocal 

 organs, but b}^ means of their wings, with or Avithout help of their 

 tail-feathers." Nobody seems to have accej)ted the offer, and we 

 understand Herr Zbppritz kept his 500 marks. Again, we find 

 in the same paper : — " Anyone with a knowledge of mechanics or 

 physics, if he sufficiently examine a dead iSnipe, must be convinced 

 that so small a bird, with wing- and tail-feathers so comparatively 

 weak, cannot possibly j^i'oduce sounds with them, which are at 

 such a distance so sharply accentuated. Hence I indulge the hope 

 that the adherents of the wing and tail theories will now v.dth- 

 draw their opinions and acknowledge that to err is hinnan." 



Lastly, in Seebohm's 'British Birds,' vol. iii. p. 244 (1885), we 

 find the following: — "I have listened to the drumming of the 

 Snipe scores of times with the express purpose of discovering the 

 mode in which the sound is produced, but must confess myself 

 completely puzzled. Ai-guing from analogy, I should say it was 

 profluced by the vocal organs, and is analogous to the trill of the 

 Stints and other Sandpipers. The fact that it appears to begin 

 the instant the bird begins to descend induces me to think that, 

 after allowance is made for the time it takes for sound to travel, 

 it must really begin before the descent, whilst the bird is not 

 moving very rapidly." 



Of such is the evidence with Avhich we have to deal. At 

 the pi'esent day I trust this theoiy has but few adherents. Pralle 

 seems to have disposed of it entirely by a note recorded in ' Nau- 

 mannia' (1852, pt. i. p. 25), that on 24th March, 1846, he heard the 

 Snipe utter its note, " gick-jack, gick-jack," while bleating. 



II. That such a sound could be produced by such feeble instru- 

 ments as tire rectrices seems to have been foreshadowed by 

 Naumann, curiously enough by a misprint of the word " tail " for 

 " wing-feathers " (' Federwild-jagd,' von Louis Liegler, Hannover, 

 1846, p. 174) : — " It is not hard with sharp eyes (still more with 

 field-glasses) to observe the quivering motion of the tips of the 

 tail-feathers [the italics are my own] during each downward and 

 upward flight through the air, sufiicient to convince one that the 

 sound is thus produced, and not from the throat of the bird. The 

 sound, or at least a similar one, can be produced if one take the 

 primaries of certain (but not too small) birds and fasten them to 

 the end of a long cane, and strikes with this, as with a sword, in a 

 draught of air." 



To which Jackel (' Naumannia,' 1855, pp. 112, 113) replies and 

 casts doubt on Naumann's theory (or, rather, mistake) of the sound 

 being produced by tail-feathers. 



In 1858 Mr. Wolley communicated a paper by Mr. Meves, of 

 Stockholm (Proc. Zool. Soc. Lond., April 1858, p. 199), wherein 

 Mr. Meves, in consequence of the misprint already quoted, was 

 led in 1856 to make experiments with the rectrices of G. coelestis. 



He remarked with surprise " that the humming sound could 

 never be produced whilst the bird was flying upwards, at which time 

 the tail is closed ; but only when it was casting itself downwards 

 in a slanting direction, with the tail strongly spread out." 



