Why Did it Tap ?
A correspondent asks me whether there is any plausible explanation of the behaviour of a bird that tapped insistently at the window at night. Some of our home birds will do this at times, rooks, for example, and owls, but in my experience the bird that flies against the window and thereafter attempts to get in is usually a migrant. A great deal of migration is done at night by birds that otherwise belong to the day ; and light undoubtedly attracts them, as it attracts many animals. For example on a recent journey across the Atlantic several stormy petrels landed on deck, and several flying-fish. In both cases this event was at night; and it is the experience of sailors along the route that such events very rarely happen except at night. When the stormy petrels pitched on deck they were quite unable to rise owing to the immense length of the wing. It is conceivable that they came to the ship from weariness, for the nearest land, it was calculated, was five hundred miles away. Such a distance, nevertheless, is of no account to this lovely and romantic bird. The fact that flying-fish come on board, and only, or generally, when the lights are on, would seem to settle the old dispute' whether they are capable of directing their flight when once launched into the air.
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