Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/610

590 intense humming. She alighted on the tree near the drills, and the male then hurled himself through the air with amazing speed, describing a curve such as would be drawn by a violently swung pendulum attached to a cord fifteen or eighteen feet long. The female was at the lowest point of the arc described by her vehement admirer, and she sat perfectly motionless while he swung past her eight times. When he moved fastest—that is, when he approached and passed her he produced in some unknown way a high, clear, sweet musical note, louder even than the humming which was incessant during his flight. In this first performance the male moved from north to south. A few minutes later he went through the dance a second time, describing a shorter curve and moving east and west. Still a third time, when the female had taken position in the midst of a few dense branches, the male faced her, and in a short arc, the plane of which was horizontal, flew back and forth before her. I had seen this performance once before, in July, 1890, at another orchard, and at that time I fancied that both birds took part in the flight, but in this case the birds were close above me as I lay among the ferns, and there was no difficulty in seeing clearly all that they did. During July, 1893, whenever I visited this orchard, which I call "No. 4," I found a male and a female rubythroat in attendance upon it.

In July and August, 1890, while watching sapsuckers at what I called orchards "No. 1" and "No. 2," I found that some woodpeckers adopted an entirely different method of dealing with humming birds from that practiced by others. At orchard No. 1 the woodpeckers drove away a humming bird with a marked display of anger whenever one showed itself near the large red maple which was being tapped. At orchard No. 2, on the contrary, the sapsuckers allowed the rubythroats to drink at drills a few inches from their own bills, and resented only marked impertinence on the part of their tiny visitors. At No. 1 scores of visits were paid by humming birds every day, but they reached the drills in a comparatively small number of instances. When they did gain them they drank long and deeply, often perching upon the bark and drinking while their nervous wings were motionless. At No.

2 it seemed impossible to estimate the number of humming birds in attendance. I went so far as to shoot a male and a female in order to feel certain that more than one pair of the tiny birds came to the drills. Nine minutes after my second crime a third humming bird was quietly drinking at the wells. Orchards No. 1 and No. 2 were deserted in or after 1891, their trees for the most part being dead, or so nearly dead as to be unattractive to the sapsuckers. A few rods from No. 2 a new orchard was observed by me in 1892. It may be a direct continuation of No. 2, but as all the woodpeckers at No. 2 were supposed to have been shot in 1890,