Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/243

Rh only two of the young were left in the nest, and though I searched amongst the undergrowth and in the gorse bush in which the nest was placed, no trace of the third bird was to be found. Of the two remaining young, one was alive and responsive but the other was dead, and though the female attended assiduously to the sole surviving offspring, yet it too had succumbed by the following morning.

In a third territory, there was a nest containing four eggs. These eggs were due to hatch at much the same time as those in the two nests just referred to, but they failed to do so, and an examination showed that they contained well developed but dead chicks.

To what can the death of the young and of the chicks in the eggs be attributed? Not to any failure in the instinctive response of the females, for they fed their young, they brooded them, they even brooded the dead as well as the living, and probably did all that racial preparation had fitted them to do. Yet the fact that the young in the second nest were lifeless and exposed at 3&thinsp; seems to betoken absence on the part of the parents during the night, and may be interpreted as a failure of the parental instinctive response. Let us return for a moment to the experiments. These showed, it will be remembered, that a rise or fall in the temperature of but a few degrees was sufficient to make an astonishing difference in the length of time that the young were able to survive without their parents; that when the tempera-