Page:Territory in Bird Life by Henry Eliot Howard (London, John Murray edition).djvu/69

Rh rare, and they are valuable since they place the identity of the individual beyond dispute. I can recall the case of a Willow-Warbler whose song was unlike that of its own or any other species, and of a Redbreast whose voice puzzled me not a little. I can recollect also a male Yellow Bunting whose foot was injured or deformed. Of this bird's behaviour I kept a record for two months or so; and inasmuch as it inhabited a roadside hedge, and was of fearless disposition, the deformed foot could plainly be seen whenever it settled upon the road to search for food. Identification is not, therefore, a difficulty. There is always some small difference in colour or in song, or some well-defined routine which makes recognition possible.

Owing to their great powers of locomotion, birds have generally been regarded as wanderers more or less; anything in the nature of a fixed abode, apart from the actual nest, having been accounted foreign to their mode of life; and even the locality immediately surrounding the nest has not been apprehended as possessing any meaning for the owner of that nest. No doubt the supply of food determines their movements for a considerable part of the year; they seek it where they can find it, here to-day, there to-morrow—in fact few species fail to move their quarters at one season or another, so that there is much truth in the notion that birds are wanderers. Yet to suppose that every individual one sees or hears—every Lapwing on the meadow, or Nightingale in the withy