Also of
non-gregarious species like the nightingale in which the males arrive in
this country several days before the females. Yet I am confident that if
we could catch and mark a considerable number of pairs it would be found
that the same male and female found one another and re-mated every year.
It comes to this, that birds may pair for life, yet not be all the time
or all the year together, as in the case of hawks, crows, owls, herons,
and many others. In numberless species which undoubtedly pair for life
the sexes keep apart during several hours each day, and there is some
evidence that those that separate for a part of the year remain faithful.
An incident, related by Miss Ethel Williams, of Winchester, in her
natural history notes contributed to a journal in that city, bears on
this point. She had among the bird pensioners in the garden of her house
adjoining the Cathedral green, a female thrush that grew tame enough to
fly into the house and feed on the dining-room table. Her thrush paired
and bred for several seasons in the garden, and the young, too, were
tame and would follow their mother into the house to be fed. The male
was wild and too shy ever to venture in. She noticed the first year that
it had a wing-feather which stuck out, owing probably to a malformation
of the socket. Each year after the breeding season the male vanished,
the female remaining alone through the winter months, but in spring the
male came back--the same bird with the unmistakable projecting
wing-feather.
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