Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/148

98 "position," which alone seems to me sufficient ground for believing that the fighting has reference to the territory. But it is not the whole of the evidence.

Now if it were possible to demonstrate by actual observation that those males which had not established territories were not pugnacious, we should have something in the nature of proof of the correctness of this view. Demonstrative evidence of this kind is, however, unattainable. Yet we can come very near to obtaining it by reason of a peculiar feature which marks the process of acquiring territory—the neutral ground. The Lapwing will serve as an illustration. In the previous chapter I referred to the small flocks that appeared in the accustomed water meadow early in February, and I described how they settled day after day in that meadow, but only in a limited part of it, where they passed their time in rest, in preening their feathers, or in running this way and that lazily searching for food; and how, at length, the flock dwindled by reason of individuals breaking away in order to secure positions on the remaining part of the meadow. Here the neutral ground is adjacent to the territories, and, while still occupied by the flock, is resorted to by the males that had deserted that flock in order to establish those territories.

Suppose now that we have the whole meadow in view from some point of vantage. In front of us are the territories, in the distance the neutral ground; and in each territory there