Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/175

Rh with such desperation. And surely success will be attained by that pair whose emotional tone stands high and whose impulse to fight is therefore strong, rather than to the ill-assorted couple.

The argument, then, is briefly this. In the spring, a marked change takes place in the character of the males of very many species; instead of being gregarious they either avoid one another and become hostile, or, if their conditions of existence require that they shall still live together, they become irritable and pugnacious. This change is made known to us by the battles of varying degrees of severity which are such a feature of bird life in the spring; and since a female can commonly be observed to accompany the combatants, the possession of a mate appears at first sight to be the proximate end for which the males are contending. But when the circumstances which lead up to the quarrels are investigated closely, the problem becomes more difficult; for it is not merely a question of males fighting in the presence of a female, as is generally supposed to be the case, but on the contrary there is a complexity of strife which is bewildering—males attack females or vice versa; female fights with female; or a pair combine to drive away another pair, or even a solitary individual no matter of which sex. This complexity of strife makes against the view that the possession of a mate is the reason of the fighting. But an even stronger objection is to be found in the fact