Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/412

 376 Correspondence,

grand coq des bois, qui pese jusqu'a 30 livres, la description sui- vante :

"A un certain moment, convenu avec les femelles, le male s'abat sur le sol et y repand una have que celles-ci viennent se disputer. Cette bave, qui les feconde una fois consommea, alias s'envolent sur les arbres voisins, ou elles donnent les signes de la plus vive jubilation.

" Quelque coUaborataur zoologista pourrait-il me confirmer cette histoire, qui me parait bian extraordinaire, me donnar le nom scientifique de cet etonnant oiseau, et, en meme temps, ma dire si cette maniera de fecondation a jamais ete decrite par un observateur scientifique, aussi si elle sa retrouve chaz d'autres oisaaux ? "

In the Rev. J. G. Wood's Illustrated Natural History is a description of the wooing of the capercaillie in Sweden, which throws some light on this curious belief. " Often "when the ground is still deeply covered with snow the cock stations him- self on a pine and commences his love-song, or play as it is termed in Sweden, to attract the hens about him .... During his ' play ' the neck of the capercaillie is stretched out, his tail is raised and spread like a fan, his wings droop, his feathers are ruffled up, and, in short, he much resembles an angry turkey-cock. He begins his play with a call something resembling /e/^r / peller ! peller t These sounds he repeats at first at soma little intervals ; but as he proceeds they increase in rapidity until at last, and after perhaps the lapse of a minute or so, he makes a sort of gulp in his throat and finishes with sucking in, as it were, his breath." This "sort of gulp" accounts, no doubt, for the notion that the capercaillie ejects a kind of saliva which fertilises the hens. But how was the idea transferred to the turkey ? Were there caper- caillies in Yorkshire at the time the American bird was introduced into that county ? If there ware, the similarity of the birds' habits of courting would account for the transference of the story to the foreigner.

Warm FIELD.

[The same belief attaches in Gloucestershire to the peahen, a bird older in this country than the turkey. Was iti transferred to the turkey from the peahen ? But how did it become attached to the peahen ? — Ed.]