Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/360

292 food will be impossible, or at any rate difficult to obtain at certain seasons. Hence th^re will come a time when the area of association ceases to follow in the wake of the expansion, and the breeding area begins to diverge from the subsistence area.

How, then, is the gulf between these two areas to be bridged? We can of course say that those individuals which, in virtue of some slight variation of hereditary tendency, return to regions where food is plentiful will survive; whilst others, less well endowed, will perish. We can state the position in some such general terms, and doubtless there would be truth in the statement, but it does not carry us far; we wish to know more of the nature of the tendency, and of the manner in which it has evolved. Well now, in this new situation which arises, two things are apparent—that the struggle for existence becomes a struggle for the means of subsistence, and that anything in the inherited constitution of the bird which can be organised to subserve the biological end in view becomes of selection value. So long as food can always be procured in the new areas of association, the individuals that behave in accordance with ancestral routine gain thereby no particular advantage; but directly the breeding range extends into regions where the supply fluctuates, traditional experience becomes a factor in survival, and those individuals that come under its influence will, on the average, be more likely to endure and so