44 U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 211 



excitement (the gee higher than the whiz-ic). This was followed by 

 his chow notes; and sometimes he flew near to me, alighting on a weed 

 and adding a portion of excited song to his entreaties or complaints." 

 Albert R. Brand (1938), in recording the vibration frequencies in 

 the songs of passerine birds, gave as the approximate mean for the 

 bobolink 3,000 and as the highest note 6,950 vibrations per second. 

 No description of the song of the bobolink is adequate to convey- 

 to the reader who has not heard it any appreciation of its beauty and 

 vivacity. It is unique among bird songs, the despair of the recorder or 

 the imitator; even the famed mockingbird cannot reproduce it. It is 

 a bubbling delirium of ecstatic music that flows from the gifted throat 

 of the bird like sparkling champagne. 



F. Schuyler Mathews (1921) calls it "a mad, reckless song-fantasia, 

 an outbreak of pent-up, irrepressible glee. The difficulty in either 

 describing or putting upon paper such music is insurmountable. One 

 can follow the singer through the first few whistled bars, and then, 

 figuratively speaking, he lets down the bars and stampedes. I have 

 never been able to 'sort out' the tones as they passed at this break- 

 neck speed." 



The song has often been rendered in human words; these attempts 

 give a good impression of the vivacity of the song, but no idea of its 

 musical quality. Among the best of these are those oft-quoted words 

 from the classic poem of William Cullen Bryant (Robert of Lincoln) : 

 "Bob-o'-link, bob-o'-link, Spink, spank, spink." Henry D. Minot 

 (1877) suggests the following: 



"Tom Noodle, Tom Noodle, you owe me, you owe me, ten shillings 

 and sixpence!" 



"I paid you, I paid you!" 

 "You didn't, you didn't!" 

 "You lie, you lie; you cheat!" 



Field marks. — The male bobolink, in spring plumage, is so con- 

 spicuously marked that it cannot be mistaken for anything else; there 

 is no other bird in its summer haunts that is at all like it. It is the only 

 one of our small land birds that reverses the almost universal law of 

 concealing coloration by being wholly black below and mainly light- 

 colored above. The female is a shy, retiring bird, never much in evi- 

 dence and generally out of sight in the long grass, where its yellowish- 

 brown colors and its stripes help to conceal it among the grass stems. 

 In the fall, all ages and sexes look much alike and can be recognized 

 only by where they are and what they are doing. 



Enemies. — The bobolinks were largely driven out of New England 

 by early mowing and raking of the hayfields. They were slaughtered 

 in enormous numbers, for the market as "reed-birds," on then- fall 

 migration. And thousands, probably millions, were killed as "rice- 



