248 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



AN OBSERVATIONAL DIARY on the NUPTIAL HABITS 

 of the BLACKCOCK (TETRAO TETRIX) in 

 SCANDINAVIA and ENGLAND. 



By Edmund Selous. 



(Part II. England.) 



(Concluded from p. 182.) 



May 9th. — Having some seven rough miles to go, with, but 

 seldom on my cycle, almost all up hill and with two very long 

 and steep ascents, I started before 1 o'clock from the sofa in my 

 sitting-room instead of going to bed. It rained and blew a good 

 deal as I crested the moor, but at last, after a hard toil through 

 the dusk, I got to the place, and some time after 3 got seated in 

 a deer-gap amidst a long hedge of beeches, surmounting a turf 

 wall, immediately facing the damp grassy space, dotted with 

 tussocks of long, coarse grass, and surrounded by the same, 

 which is, here, the birds' meeting-place. I had not sat there 

 many minutes, and there was, as yet, no sign of its lightening, 

 when some half-dozen shadowy yet solid-looking forms, a little 

 blacker than the night, came whirling high over the hedge, and 

 sank down a little beyond it. As they did so, at once on all 

 sides, the shadows of the earth became musical with the various 

 notes of the birds, and long before I could see them with the 

 naked eye, I could, with the glasses, make out, in a dim black 

 world, the still blacker forms of the cocks. From their activity 

 there could be no doubt that some hens were there too, and, as 

 it lightened slowly, it became apparent that courtship was pro- 

 ceeding. This presented no very new point, but gradually it 

 impresses itself that the hens come to these places, where the 

 cocks assemble to wait for them, in order to be courted by the 

 latter, and to mate with this bird or that. This last — that is to 

 say, the actual coition — is attended with more difficulties than is 

 the case with the Ruffs, the tendency amongst which birds of 



