Page:The Migration of Birds - Thomas A Coward - 1912.pdf/29



question—What makes Birds Migrate? or what causes them to remove from one zone to another at certain seasons, has been answered, no doubt to the satisfaction of the respondents, in many varied ways. Closely connected with the question of immediate impulse is the deeper, and less easy to prove problem as to how migration originated.

It has been dogmatically asserted repeatedly that birds invariably breed in the most northerly part of their range, and winter in the most southerly. Winter, when speaking of Holarctic birds, only applies to the season in the northern hemisphere; the birds which pass south of the equator winter in summer. Whilst accepting this as a rule, two reservations must be made. First, that it only applies to birds of the northern hemisphere, and secondly that it is a rule with exceptions. It seems probable that the breeding area of some of the birds which reach the British Islands in autumn by the so-called east and west route is in more southerly latitudes than our islands, and certainly it seems