Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/119

Rh the most severe struggle might readily be interpreted as a game if it were not for certain symptoms which reveal its inner nature. The males of many other migrants can frequently be observed to fight when there was every reason to believe that females had still to arrive. The Blackcap is notoriously pugnacious, but not more so than the Marsh-Warbler or the Whinchat. Here in Worcestershire, the Arundo phragmites grows mainly on certain sheets of water which are comparatively few and far between, and the Reed-Warbler is consequently restricted to isolated and more or less confined areas. The males arrive early in May before the new growth of reeds has attained any considerable height, and each one has its own position in the reed-bed, sings there, and throughout the whole period of reproduction actively resists intrusion on the part of other males. I have kept watch upon a small area of reeds daily from the date of the first arrival; each individual was known to me, and as the growing reeds were only a few inches in height, a female could scarcely have escaped detection. Yet time and again disputes arose, and males pursued and pecked one another, striving to attain that isolation for which racial preparation had fitted them.

But on account of their violence, or their novelty, or because the absence of a female was beyond question, some battles stand out in one's memory more prominently than others. An instance of this was a struggle between two