University of Kansas Publications

Museum of Natural History

Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 45-75, 6 pls., 1 fig.

December 20, 1956

Comparative Breeding Behavior of Ammospiza caudacuta and A. maritima

BY

GLEN E. WOOLFENDEN

University of Kansas
Lawrence
1956

University of Kansas Publications, Museum of Natural History

Editors: E. Raymond Hall, Chairman, Henry S. Fitch,
Harrison B. Tordoff

Volume 10, No. 2, pp. 45-75, 6 pls., 1 fig.
Published December 20, 1956

University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas

PRINTED BY
FERD VOILAND. JR., STATE PRINTER
TOPEKA, KANSAS
1956

Comparative Breeding Behavior
of Ammospiza caudacuta and A. maritima

BY

GLEN E. WOOLFENDEN

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Taxonomically the Genus Ammospiza has received the attention of ornithologists for more than a century. Nevertheless, the behavior of no species of the genus has been studied extensively. The papers of Montagna and Tomkins are the only works that mention behavior and natural history in any detail. There has been an increasing awareness of the importance of ethological data and of their usefulness in systematics. For these reasons, I made a comparative study of the breeding behavior of the Sharp-tailed Sparrow (Ammospiza caudacuta) and the Seaside Sparrow (Ammospiza maritima) in New Jersey in the spring and summer of 1955.

The Seaside Sparrow is restricted to the Gulf- and Atlantic-coasts of North America, breeding north to Massachusetts. The Sharp-tailed Sparrow breeds south to North Carolina. The overlap of the breeding ranges of the two species is therefore small. Furthermore the forms breeding in the coastal states are restricted to tidal marshes, and the geographically peripheral colonies of each species are small. Irregular nesting is the case for the northernmost colonies of the Seaside Sparrow, on Cape Cod (Griscom, 1944:317), and the same is probably