into this, however, let us first notice how a snipe conducts itself when drumming. The snipe only drums during the breeding season, and then it is only the male bird who does the drumming. As far as my own observations have enabled me to connect a certain male snipe with a certain nest, I believe the bird begins to drum about a week before the first egg is .laid, and continues to drum till about three weeks after the young are out of the shell; but I would not have this taken as anything very far removed from guess-work. The bird drums more assiduously while the female is actually sitting, than at any other time. The snipe appears to me to have an ill-defined general rule that most of his drumming shall be done during three portions of the day; the first portion beginning soon after daylight and lasting for from half an hour to an hour, the second portion beginning about one o'clock and lasting for from an hour to three hours, and the third portion about an hour before sunset and lasting till the sun has sunk below the horizon. There are many exceptions to this rule, if a rule it be. The drumming snipe mounts to a certain height and then, while flying horizontally, suddenly takes a head-foremost dive obliquely towards the earth. This dive-the personal equation has plenty of scope here, and my own conclusions may differ not a little from those of others-is never less than eighteen feet and never more than about thirty feet. The dive is ended by the bird suddenly throwing its body into a plane with the earth. This done, it generally flies horizontally for a few yards and then again mounts up to the level from which it took its dive. Soon after-one might say usually three or four minutes after, though the interval may be anything between a minute and an hour-the first dive, another dive is taken, and so on. The drumming snipe,' quoting myself again, 'seems never to tire. Backwards and forwards, round and round, now up now down, so he continues to amuse himself by the hour. The nearer he is to one, the more is his drumming like the bleating of a goat or lamb; the further away, the more does it resemble an insect's buzz or the vibrations of a twanged harp-string. There is an odd effect when conditions of atmosphere or of distance are such that the sound takes seconds to reach one. One sees the bird stoop headlong through the air, one sees him recover himself and speed away and upwards again, and then, but not till then, the buzzing created by his swoop is heard. . . . The volume of sound of the drumming of a snipe is not, I fancy, greater in proportion to the wing surface than the buzzing of certain insects: increase the area of a blue-bottle's wings to that of a snipe's, and I think you would hear the buzzing of the mighty blow-fly at quite as lengthy a distance as that at which the snipe's drumming is audible. . . . I have estimated, while watching a snipe on the wing, that the drumming is to be heard at least three times as far away as the bird's note, and I have also estimated that on a clear still day the former sound is audible at quite half a mile. On such a day when the eye may no longer follow the bird the buzzing still reaches the listener's ear.' And now back to the question as to how the sound is produced. The vocal organs having nothing to do with the matter, the sound must be created, (1) by the tilt of the bird's frame during the swoop, that is, by vibrations set up by wings and tail, or one or the other, as the consequence of their resistance to the air when held at a certain angle to the line of descent, (2) by wing action, that is, by vibrations aroused by the play of the wings against the air, (3) by vibration of the tail feathers, this vibration being generated, not by the simple passage of the body. through the air with the tail feathers held at a certain angle to the line of descent, but by the current thrown upon the tail by the play of the wings, or (4) by con |