NATURE NOTES

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21906, 15 September 1934, Page 1 (Supplement)

NATURE NOTES

BY J. DRUMMOXD, F.L.S., F.Z.S.

THE CHAFFINCH

In all parts of New Zealand, particularly in the warm climate of North Auckland, chaffinches are beginning to make nests admitted to be models of architecture and very beautiful structures. Moss, dry grass, lichens and cobwebs aro the usual materials for the stout outside walls. Wool, hairs, the down of plants and soft feathers make a comfortable lining. Lichens are not always available. In their absence, nieces of paper are used. These do not harmonise so well with the tree, the hedge or the ivy selected for a site, and do not give the same seclusion. Tho materials are worked and woven into a solid, compact little nest, shaped like a cup. Mr. Edmund Selous, prince of observers, attributed all building operations to the female. He saw a female drive a male from an incomplete nest. After putting the male to flight, the female flew to tho nest fifteen times, at intervals of about ten minutes, carrying a piece of material each time, and working iu in vigorously. Another able English observer, Mr. W. 11. Hudson, admits that the female is architect and master builder, but he saw males doing some of the rough work, collecting and delivering materials, content to bo general labourers.

The nest is creditable to both sexes. When four, five or six small pale bluish green eggs, tinged with purply brown and spotted and streaked with red, lie at the bottom, it is like an exquisite jewel-box. By their actions, male and female show that the nest and the eggs are regarded as treasured possessions. If a person goes near the nest the owners become distressed and excited. They flutter around and utter sharp, harsh, anxious notes, which should touch the heart of even a bird-nesting boy whom a county council may pay for the eggs, or. of a farmer who remembers that chaffinches take his grain and seeds, but forgets that they feed young chaffinches on caterpillars and small insects only, and that, as recorded in New Zealand, the young may be given thirty-five meals in one hour. Grown-ups vary their diet with grain and seeds, but they also take many in*sects in summer, sometimes catching them in the air as adroitly as insects are caught by New Zealand's native fantails.

Mr. Hudson delighted to listen to two males singing against each other. It did not seem to him that they were merely songsters, singing for mastery. The efforts expressed the males' jealous and pugnacious dispositions. A male chaffinch, he discovered, will not tolerate another male near it. If it heaj-s another in the distance, it answers song with song. If the sound is near, the rival is eagerly sought, and as likely as not there is a combat, breast to breast, for the territory the rivals occupy. The chaffinch's song is used by Major R. W. G. Hingston as an illustration of the theory that all birds' songs are threats, not expressions of tender feelings. Burns thought that the mavis, which New Zealanders call song-thrush, sang its love-song to the morn. Major Hingston, a man of science, not a poet, has collected many facts connected with birds' songs. He claims that if a male's song is intended to please a female, the facts are meaningless, but that all support the theory that song is a threat.

In New Zealand, especially at present, the chaffinch's song is heard near the fringes of forests, along country roads and in parks, orchards and public and suburban gardens. A New Zealand naturalist could hear in the song only "twink, twink," followed by "tweet, tweet, tweet." Tracing a joyous strain in the song, the French have a saying, " As gay as a chaffinch." To Mr. Hudson's trained ears the notes were joyous -and loud. They were much more to John Burroughs. This old-time English naturalist wrote: " The song, rapid, loud and incessant, is very characteristic. Through May, and probably during all the spring months, the chaffinch makes two-thirds of the music that ordinarily is heard by people who walk or drive about the country in England. The song begins with a rapid trill. This quickly becomes a sharp jingle, then slides into a warble, and ends with an abrupt flourish. I never heard any other song that began so liltingly and ended with such a quick, abrupt emphasis." '

Nobody in New Zealand seems to have noted a peculiarity associated with chaffinches' movements in flocks, which often is commented on in England. In England and in Europe observers have noted in autumn and winter large flocks composed of members of one sex only. Linnaeus reported that all females left Sweden in the winter, and that all males stayed behind. This induced him to name the species Fringilla caelebs, the bachelor finch. His observation was not completely confirmed, but the name remains. The sexes do not separate in this way in the south and in the west of England. Males were seen in small parties of three or four or a dozen at one place in Scotland. The females had disappeared. The same thing occurred in the nofth of England.

Charming Gilbert White, vicar of Selbourne, 165 years ago knew that the sexes separated in the winter and were seen in separate flocks. He could not understand why flocks of females were commoner than flocks of males, and he asked his correspondents in the north of England to tell him of which sex the flocks were mostly composed. Mr. Hudson presumed that the habit is confined to autumn arrivals in England from Europe, and that the migratory instinct is felt earlier and more powerfully by females than by males. If there are massed movements of chaffinches in New Zealand they have not been recorded. Males may be distinguished by a black forehead, a chestnut back, a pink breast, fading into white lower down, each wing barred obliquely with white. The white bars are less conspicuous on the female, whose lower parts are greyish-white.

The black-backed seagull, according to Mr. G. J. Garland, of Mangero, favours toheroas rather than pipis where toheroas are available. Ho has seen a seagull on the West Coast of tho North Island carry a toheroa up in the air a hundred feet or more, drop it on the hard black sand, and pick out the flesh from the broken shell, if a shell is not broken at first the seagull repeats the effort until it succeeds. These seagulls nest at the same time as the black-capped terns, or seaswallows, and impudently rely on the terns for fish food for the young seagulls When a tern dives and catches a small fish, a seagull, stronger on the wine, pursues the tern, which screams in alarm and drops the fish. The seagull darts in, catches the fish before it reaches the water, and takes it to the hungry young seagulls. Mr. Garland supplies saddleback as another name for this seagull, which he condemns as an indolent parasite and a scavenger always looking for dead fishes or other refuse on the beaches.