Chap. XVI. THE YOUNG LIKE THE ADULT MALES. 205 
breast. She is usually the more courageous and 
pugilistic. She makes a deep hollow guttural boom, 
especially at night, sounding like a small gong. The 
male has a slenderer frame and is more docile, wdth 
no voice beyond a suppressed hiss when angry, or a 
‘‘ croak.” He not only performs the whole duty of 
incubation, but has to defend the young from their 
mother; ^^for as soon as she catches sight of her pro- 
geny she becomes violently agitated, and notwith- 
standing the resistance of the father appears to use 
her utmost endeavours to destroy them. For months 
afterwards it is unsafe to put the parents together, 
violent quarrels being the inevitable result, in which 
^*the female generally comes off conqueror.” So 
that with this emu we have a complete reversal not 
only of the parental and incubating instincts, but of 
the usual moral qualities of the two sexes ; the females 
being savage, quarrelsome and noisy, the males gentle 
and good. The case is very different with the African 
ostrich, for the male is somewhat larger than the fe- 
male and has finer plumes with more strongly con- 
trasted colours; nevertheless he undertakes the whole 
duty of incubation.^^ 
I will specify the few other cases known to me, in 
which the female is more conspicuously coloured than 
the male, although nothing is known about their man- 
ner of incubation. With the carrion-hawk of the Falk- 
land Islands (Milvago leucurus) I was much surprised 
to find by dissection that the individuals, which had 
all their tints strongly pronounced, with the cere and 
legs orange-coloured, were the adult females ; whilst 
23 See the excellent account of the habits of this bird under confine- 
ment, by Mr. A. Wh Bennett, in ‘Land and Water,' May, 1868, p. 233. 
2“^ Mr. Sclater, on the incubation of the Struthiones, ‘Proc. Zoo. 
Soc.,' June 9, 1863. 
