Land birds. 



441 



are more or less gregarious even when nesting, and in favorable localities 

 scores, or even hundreds, of nests may be found placed here and there at 

 intervals of but a few yards, sometimes only five or ten feet apart. 



The song, if it can be called such, commonly consists of three syllables 

 which Emerson writes " o-ka-lee, " and Samuels as " quonk-a-ree." Nehrling 

 writes this " con-cur-ee," and calls its whistling note "tii-tii." This 

 whistle is one of the clearest and most penetrating of bird-calls and in clear 

 weather can be heard at great distances. When one is collecting in a marsh 

 where Red-wings are nesting in numbers this persistent and powerful 



Fig. 101. Red-winged Blackbird. Young about five days from nest. 

 Photograph from mounted specimen. (Original.) 



whistle becomes so monotonous and yet so painful to a sensitive ear that 

 at length the irritation becomes almost unbearable. 



As soon as the young are able to fly the birds gather into larger or smaller 

 flocks and begin to forage on the cultivated fields in the vicinity, retiring 

 at night to the cattail marshes to roost. It is at this time that the greatest 

 harm is done to grain, for the birds sometimes assemble in flocks of twenty 

 to fifty thousand and are capable of inflicting heavy damage upon oats or 

 wheat. This has been more particularly the case in the past, for in the early 

 history of the state the breeding grounds of the blackbirds were extra- 

 ordinarily abundant and the grain fields were few and far between. Thus 

 an immense blackbird population was likely to concentrate on a small 

 acreage of grain, naturally with disastrous results. The steady increase 

 in the area of cultivated lands, and perhaps more especially the drainage 

 of a large part of the swamps and marshes, has changed these conditions 

 completely; at present not nearly as many blackbirds are reared in the state 



