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[[underline]] Cyanerpes, [[/underline]] Mar. 9, 1958, I (59)

Caught a new pair of Shinings in the net this morning; and finally let them loose in the aviary this afternoon. God! What a mess! A few minutes of very violent disputing; and the new ♀ was so badly injured that I had to pull the new pair out (the new ♂ was pretty battle-scarred too!) The eventual outcome of the whole encounter was that the old pair rushed to the new one, displayed violently, the new pair displayed back violently, the old pair attacked, and the new pair fled.
The displaying was unbelievably fast on the whole; and I certainly couldn't follow all of it, but I did notice the following. Mostly R and Bzz calls with [[underline]] a huge variety of St postures!! [[/underline]]

The relationship between the Bzz and R is a little clearer now. The old birds began violent R-ing when I first put the new ones in -- and the new ones R'd back -- during a brief initial lull before the actual fighting broke out. The Bzz's began when the real violent fighting began, when they were uttered by all 4 birds. At this time the R's almost stopped completely. This would confirm my theory that the Bzz is higher intensity than the R. And this afternoon it was also very noticeable that the Bzz seemed to intergrade with the R; i.e. [[underline]] some R's became faster & faster until they developed into perfectly typical Bzz's. [[/underline]] It was my impression that the relative level of aggressiveness was much the same in both the Bzz and the R (certainly both or either could be given by either retreating or advancing birds.) It is possible that some Bzz's are more aggressive than any R's -- as it was Bzz's rather than R's which were given by the attacking birds during the fight -- but I think that this appearance was deceptive -- just the result of the fact