South America and West Indies. Migrations—Early May. From August to October. Common summer resident.

Conspicuously Black and White

Perhaps none of our birds have so fitted into song and story as the bobolink. Unlike a good child, who should “be seen and not heard,” he is heard more frequently than seen. Very shy, of peering eyes, he keeps well out of sight in the meadow grass before entrancing our listening ears. The bobolink never soars like the lark, as the poets would have us believe, but generally sings on the wing, flying with a peculiar self-conscious flight horizontally thirty or forty feet above the meadow grass. He also sings perched upon the fence or tuft of grass. He is one of the greatest poseurs among the birds.

In spring and early summer the bobolinks respond to every poet’s effort to imitate their notes. “Dignified ‘Robert of Lincoln’ is telling his name,” says one; “Spink, spank, spink,” another hears him say. But best of all are Wilson Flagg’s lines:

... “ Now they rise and now they fly;

They cross and turn, and in and out, and down the middle and wheel about,

With a ‘ Phew, shew, Wadolincon; listen to me Bobolincon! ’ ”

After midsummer the cares of the family have so worn upon the jollity of our dashing, rollicking friend that his song is seldom heard. The colors of his coat fade into a dull yellowish brown like that of his faithful mate, who has borne the greater burden of the season, for he has two complete moults each year.

The bobolinks build their nest on the ground in high grass. The eggs are of a bluish white. Their food is largely insectivorous: grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, spiders, with seeds of grass especially for variety. In August they begin their journey southward, flying mainly by night.. Arriving in the Southern States, they become the sad-colored, low-voiced rice or reed bird, feeding on the rice fields, where they descend to the ignominious fate of being dressed for the plate of the epicure. Could there be a more tragic ending to the glorious note of the gay songster of the north?

BOBOLINKS. ¾ Life-size.

Conspicuously Black and White

Blackpoll Warbler (Dendroica striata) Wood Warbler family Length— 5.5 to 6 inches. About an inch smaller than the English sparrow. Male—Black cap; cheeks and beneath grayish white, forming a sort of collar, more or less distinct. Upper parts striped gray, black, and olive. Breast and under parts white, with black streaks. Tail olive-brown, with yellow-white spots. Female—Without cap. Greenish-olive above, faintly streaked Range—Northwith black.America,Paler thanto Greenlandmale. Bandsand Alaska.on wings,In yellowish.winter, to Migrations—Lastnorthern partofofMay.South LateAmerica.October.

A faint “ screep, screep,” like “the noise made by striking two pebbles together,” Audubon says, is often the only indication of the blackpoll’s presence; but surely that tireless bird-student had heard its more characteristic notes, which, rapidly uttered, increasing in the middle of the strain and diminishing toward the end, suggest the shrill, wiry hum of some midsummer insect. After the opera-glass has searched him out we find him by no means an inconspicuous bird. A dainty little fellow, with a glossy black cap pulled over his eyes, he is almost hidden by the dense foliage on the trees by the time he returns to us at the very end of spring. Giraud says that he is the very last of his tribe to come north, though the bay-breasted warbler has usually been thought the bird to wind up the spring procession.

The blackpoll has a certain characteristic motion that distinguishes him from the black-and-white creeper, for which a hasty glance might mistake him, and from the jolly little chickadee with his black cap. Apparently he runs about the tree-trunk, but in reality he so flits his wings that his feet do not touch the bark at all; yet so rapidly does he go that the flipping wing-motion is not observed. He is most often seen in May in the apple trees, peeping into the opening blossoms for insects, uttering now and then his slender, lisping, brief song.

Vivacious, a busy hunter, often catching insects on the wing like the flycatchers, he is a cheerful, useful neighbor the short time he spends with us before travelling to the far north, where he mates and nests. A nest has been found on Slide Mountain, in the Catskills, but the hardy evergreens of Canada, and some- 63

Conspicuously Black and White

times those of northern New England, are the chosen home of this little bird that builds a nest of bits of root, lichens, and sedges, amply large for a family twice the size of his.

Black-and-white Creeping Warbler (Mniotilta varia) Wood Warbler family Called also: VARIED CREEPING WARBLER; BLACK-AND-

WHITE CREEPER ; WHITEPOLL WARBLER

Length—5 to 5.5 inches. About an inch smaller than the English sparrow. Male—Upper parts white, varied with black. A white stripe along the summit of the head and back of the neck, edged with black. White line above and below the eye. Black cheeks and throat, grayish in females and young. Breast white in middle, with black stripes on sides. Wings and tail rusty black, with two white cross-bars on former, and soiled white markings on tail quills. Female—Paler and less distinct markings throughout. Range—Peculiar to America. Eastern United States and westward to the plains. North as far as the fur countries. Winters in tropics south of Florida. Migrations—April. Late September. Summer resident.

Nine times out of ten this active little warbler is mistaken for the downy woodpecker, not because of his coloring alone, but also on account of their common habit of running up and down the trunks of trees and on the under side of branches, looking for insects, on which all the warblers subsist. But presently the true warbler characteristic of restless flitting about shows itself. A woodpecker would go over a tree with painstaking, systematic care, while the black-and-white warbler, no less intent upon securing its food, hurries off from tree to tree, wherever the most promising menu is offered.

Clinging to the mottled bark of the tree-trunk, which he so closely resembles, it would be difficult to find him were it not for these sudden flittings and the feeble song, “ Weachy, weachy, weachy, 'twee, 'twee, 'tweet," he half lisps, half sings between his dashes after slugs. Very rarely indeed can his nest be found in an old stump or mossy bank, where bark, leaves, and hair make the downy cradle for his four or five tiny babies. 64

BLACK AND WHITE CREEPING WARBLER.

Life-size.

DUSKY AND GRAY AND SLATE-COLORED

BIRDS

Chimney Swift

Kingbird

Wood Pewee

Phoebe and Say’s Phoebe

Crested Flycatcher

Olive-sided Flycatcher

Least Flycatcher

Chickadee

Tufted Titmouse

Canada Jay

Catbird

Mocking-bird

Junco

White-breasted Nuthatch

Red-breasted Nuthatch

Loggerhead Shrike

Northern Shrike

Bohemian Waxwing

Bay-breasted Warbler

Chestnut-sided Warbler

Golden-winged Warbler

Myrtle Warbler

Parula Warbler

Black-throated Blue Warbler

See also the Grayish Green and the Grayish Brown Birds, particularly the Cedar

Bird, several Swallows, the Acadian and the Yellow-bellied Flycatchers; Alice’s and

the Olive-backed Thrushes; the Louisiana Water Thrush; the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher; and the Seaside Sparrow. See also the females of the following birds: Pine

Grosbeak; White-winged Red Crossbill; Purple Martin; and the Nashville, the Pine,

and the Magnolia Warblers.

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DUSKY, GRAY, AND SLATE-COLORED BIRDS

Chimney Swift (Chcetura pelagica Swift family

Called also: CHIMNEY SWALLOW; AMERICAN SWIFT Length—5 to 5.45 inches. About an inch shorter than the English sparrow. Long wings make its length appear greater. Male and Female—Deep sooty gray; throat of a trifle lighter gray.

Wings extend an inch and a half beyond the even tail, which has sharply pointed and very elastic quills, that serve as props.

Feet are muscular, and have exceedingly sharp claws. Range—Peculiar to North America east of the Rockies, and from

Labrador to Panama. Migrations—April. September or October. Common summer resident.

The chimney swift is, properly speaking, not a swallow at all, though chimney swallow is its more popular name. Rowing towards the roof of your house, as if it used first one wing, then the other, its flight, while swift and powerful, is stiff and mechanical, unlike the swallow’s, and its entire aspect suggests a bat. The nighthawk and whippoorwill are its relatives, and it resembles them not a little, especially in its nocturnal habits.

So much fault has been found with the misleading names of many birds, it is pleasant to record the fact that the name of the chimney swift is everything it ought to be. No other birds can surpass and few can equal it in its powerful flight, sometimes covering a thousand miles in twenty-four hours, it is said, and never resting except in its roosting places (hollow trees or chimneys of dwellings), where it does not perch, but rather clings to the sides with its sharp claws, partly supported by its sharper tail. Audubon tells of a certain plane tree in Kentucky where he counted over nine thousand of these swifts clinging to the hollow trunk.

Dusky, Gray, and Slate-colored

Their nest, which is a loosely woven twig lattice, made of twigs of trees, which the birds snap off with their beaks and carry in their beaks, is glued with the bird’s saliva or tree-gum into a solid structure, and firmly attached to the inside of chimneys, or hollow trees where there are no houses about. Two broods in a season usually emerge from the pure white, elongated eggs.

What a twittering there is in the chimney that the swifts appropriate after the winter fires have died out! Instead of the hospitable column of smoke curling from the top, a cloud of sooty birds wheels and floats above it. A sound as of distant thunder fills the chimney as a host of these birds, startled, perhaps, by some indoor noise, whirl their way upward. Woe betide the happy colony if a sudden cold snap in early summer necessitates the starting of a fire on the hearth by the unsuspecting householder! The glue being melted by the fire, “down comes the cradle, babies and all ” into the glowing embers. A prolonged, heavy rain also causes their nests to loosen their hold and fall with the soot to the bottom. Thrifty New England housekeepers claim that bedbugs, commonly found on bats, infest the bodies of swifts also, which is one reason why wire netting is stretched across the chimney tops before the birds arrive from the South.

Kingbird (Tyrannus tyrannus) Flycatcher family

Called also: TYRANT FLYCATCHER; BEE MARTIN Length—8 inches. About two inches shorter than the robin. Male—Ashy black above; white, shaded with ash-color, beneath.

A concealed crest of orange-red on crown. Tail black, ter-minating with a white band conspicuous in flight. Wing feathers edged with white. Feet and bill black. Female—Similar to the male, but lacking the crown. Range—United States to the Rocky Mountains. British provinces to Central and South America. Migrations—May. September. Common summer resident.

If the pugnacious propensity of the kingbird is the occasion of its royal name, he cannot be said to deserve it from any fine or noble qualities he possesses. He is a born fighter from the very 68

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