WOODCOCK 
found in the markings of the feathers have been indicated as diagnostic, 
but all these I have proved to be absolutely valueless. 
“ In 1873, Gould (‘ Birds of Great Britain,’ iv, p. 77) expressed his views 
on the subject as follows : ‘ Some sportsmen assert that they can dis- 
tinguish the sexes by an examination of the outer primary, and affirm 
that those birds which have the external margin of that feather plain 
or devoid of tooth -like markings are males, and those in which it 
exists are females. But they are absent in both sexes of very old birds ; 
for I have wings of females in my collection in which the outer margin 
of the first primary is totally devoid of the toothed character. When the 
young woodcock assumes his first primaries, which he does at the age 
of two or three weeks, the outer feather is strongly marked ; and I have 
frequently seen specimens with the outer primary toothed for half its 
length, and the other part plain.’ 
“It will thus be seen that, though Gould did not believe that there was 
any sexual distinction to be found in the plumage, he implies that the 
woodcocks with tooth -like markings on the outer web of the first long 
fiight-feather are the young birds of the year; that these tooth-like mark- 
ings gradually disappear with age — i.e., at the second and subsequent 
autumn moults, when the flight -feathers are shed ; and that the birds 
with a narrow whitish-buff border to the outer web of the first long flight- 
feather are ‘ very old birds,’ more than two years old. This statement 
has been generally accepted as correct, and has been copied and recopied 
by various authors, even by that most careful writer, Howard Saunders, 
who in 1899 writes as follows (‘ 111. Man. Brit. Birds,’ p. 570): ‘ In the young 
birds the outer webs of all the primaries show distinct fulvous notches ; 
in the adult there are hardly any such markings on the first and second 
webs.’ The investigations which I have undertaken during the last few 
years have clearly proved the entire fallacy of this theory. 
‘ ‘ On the higher parts of the islands of the Azores the woodcock is a very 
common bird, and during the five months I spent there, from February 
to June, 1903, I shot and examined a very large number of these birds, 
many of which were breeding. These exhibited all varieties of markings 
on the first long flight -feather, some, both males and females, having 
a narrow border of creamy-white along the margin of the outer web (fig. 
1), while others had well-defined tooth -like buff markings along the 
whole of the outer web (fig. 2), and examples in every intermediate stage 
were also observed. Subsequently Mr E. G. B. Meade-Waldo, who was 
225 
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