Page:BirdWatcherShetlands.djvu/303

Rh How ill do such facts as the above accord with the theory that the male bird is too eager to exercise choice in regard to the female. Darwin also (p. 420) adduces evidence to show that the domestic cock prefers the younger to the older hens; that the male pheasant, when hybridised with the fowl, has the opposite taste, "is most capricious in his attachments, and, from some inexplicable cause, shows the most determined aversion to certain hens"; that some hens are quite unattractive, even to the males of their own species; and that, with the long-tailed duck, certain females are much more courted than the rest, of which last state of things I have, if I mistake not, seen a hint with the eider-duck. Again, then, what becomes of the supposed indiscriminate eagerness of the male? Has not this theory been accepted too unreservedly, and on a too slender foundation of evidence?

It is significant that most of the above-quoted observations were made on birds in confinement, or under domestication, in which states, of course, they are very much easier to watch. Of the intimate domestic habits of birds—that is to say, of most birds—in a wild state, we know, I believe, very little, and have assumed very much. I might give here two cases—I have elsewhere given some instances—of what appeared to me to be violent rivalry on the part of hen blackbirds; but I refer again to what I have noticed in regard to the nuptial habits of those seabirds, the bright interior colouring of whose mouths