Page:Birdcraft-1897.djvu/259



making his last appearance as an article of food, heralded on the restaurant bill of fare thus: “Reed-birds, four on a skewer, 50 cents.”

Strange to say that twothirds of the gunners who do the shooting deny that the birds are identical and that they are killing so much latent music. “The brown birds are all females,” they say, “which, being greatly in excess of the males, remain after the latter have disappeared.” I would advise all such incredulous ones to buy The Auk (an intel- ligible ornithological quarterly) for October, 1893, where they will ﬁnd a paper on this subject by Mr. Frank M. Chapman, and a coloured plate showing the Bobolink life- sized, in the spring transition, when he is again moulting the stripes for the breedingcoat.

Of all our songsters none enter into the literature of fact and fancy more fully than the Bobolink, and none so exhila- rates us by his song. Sit upon the fence of an upland meadow any time from early May until the last of June, watch and listen. Up from the grass the Bobolinks ﬂy, some singing and dropping again, others rising Lark-like until the distant notes sound like the tinkling of an ancient clavichord. Then, while you are gazing Skyward, from the choke-cherry tree above your head will come the hurried syllables in which Mr. Burroughs interprets the song: “Ha! Ha! Ha! I must have my fun, Miss Silver- thimble, if I break every heart in the meadow, see, see, see!” Meanwhile, the grass is full of nests and brown mothers, neither of which you see, for you are wholly entranced by the song.

Bryant’s poem on Robert of Lincoln contains a good description of the bird’s plumage, but is too precise and measured to express the rapture of the song. It may de- scribe a stuffed Bobolink, but never a wild, living one. Wil- son Flagg’s verses on The O’Lincon Family, one of which I quote, are in truer key : ~—

“ Every one’s a. funny fellow; every one‘s a little mellow;

Follow, follow, follow, follow, o’er the hill and in the hollow.

Merrily, merrily, there they hie; now they rise and now they ﬂy ; 166