116 U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 211 



his head. The blows were delivered slowly, deliberately, and sharply 

 with the aid of body and neck movements. This lasted fully eight 

 minutes. The subdued male continuously uttered alarm calls, and 

 whenever he turned his head around to offer resistance he 

 pecked him about the eyes. The one-sided battle ended when some 

 other males were attracted to the scene; they, however, did not join 

 in the combat. The victim was slightly bloody about the nape, had 

 lost a number of feathers, and I supposed that he was almost dead, 

 but he got up, shook himself, and flew weakly away. * * * Females 

 were never seen fighting among themselves, nor attacking men." 



Voice. — My impressions of the striking song of the yellow-headed 

 blackbird, as heard many years ago while my hearing was good, are 

 mentioned in the beginning of this story; the oka wee wee, oka wee wee, 

 oka wee wee notes were the dominant sounds in the slough, and I can 

 seem to hear their rhythmic swing even now. But I cannot find in 

 print any rendering of the song that is quite like what I wrote in my 

 notes at the time. What Dawson (in Dawson and Bowles, 1909) 

 calls the alarm cry "uttered with exceeding vehemence, klookoloy, 

 klookoloy, klook ooooo," seems to have a similar rhythm and may be 

 a variation of what I heard. Then he adds: "Ok-eh-ah-oh-oo is a 

 musical series of startling brilliancy, comparable in a degree to the 

 yodelling of a street urchin, a succession of sounds of varying pitches, 

 produced as tho by altering the oral capacity. * * * The last note 

 is especially mellow and pleasing, recalling to some ears the liquid 

 gurgle of the Bobolink." Mrs. Bailey (1928) quotes from some 

 manuscript notes from Merrill, of Mesilla Park: "While nothing can 

 be more raucous than the note of a single individual, the united 

 voices of a few hundred * * * produce an effect very pleasing, if not 

 strictly harmonious." These are all the words I can find of even 

 faint praise of the song. 



Everybody else condemns it as unmusical and unattractive. Aretas 

 A. Saunders tells me that, from his memory of it in Montana, "the 

 form and length of the song is quite like that of the red-wing, there 

 being several short notes at the beginning and a more prolonged note 

 at the end. The quality is most unmusical, however, and the last 

 note sounds like a ludicrous squawk." 



The severest condemnation comes from P. A. Taverner (1934): 



The song of the Yellow-headed — if song it can be called, as it lacks every 

 musical quality — is like that of no other Canadian bird. Climbing stiff -leggedly 

 up a reed or tule stalk the male, with wings partly raised, lowers his head as if 

 to be violently ill, and disgorges a series of rough, angular consonants, jerkily 

 and iregularly, with many contortions and writhings, as if their sharp corners 

 caught in the throat and they were born with pain and travail. They finally 

 culminate and bring satisfied relief in a long-drawn, descending buzz, like the 

 slipping of an escapement in a clock spring and the consequent rapid unwinding 



