Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/266

254 common to both, the voice and delivery are very unlike the robin's:

I am told that this bird has also a very musical whistling call.

I found the grossbeaks in Belknap County, N. H., in June, 1886, and in St. Lawrence County, N. Y., in June, 1887.

In their fall migrations they go in flocks, occasionally calling upon the farmers for food, appearing as tame and as much at home as if they had been raised by them. Flocks have passed through northern New Hampshire on their journey south in December, paying leisurely visits to the cider mills for the apple seeds in the cast-off pomace, apparently very little concerned about the cold.

—It is the black-billed cuckoo whose song, with very little merit, has become famous. It must be the low pitch, the solemn manner of delivery, and the quality of tone, that have attracted the attention of the writers; for there is little variety in the rhythm and the least possible in the melody. The rather doleful, straightforward repetition of the singer's name is not heard every day; the cuckoo, too, has his moods.

I have heard this bird nearly every summer of my life, and never any departure from the old, monotonous strain, until recently (1888). Early one June morning, sultry and warm, a bird was exercising his voice in a manner that set me on the alert; it was the voice of a cuckoo, but not the cuckoo's song: