BOBOLINK 41 



pias), and while watching them on July 10 I observed a curious per- 

 formance. On several occasions the males would flock together as 

 at a prearranged signal, fly rapidly from the field in close formation 

 for a considerable distance, and then scatter like the fragments of a 

 bursting shell, each bird turning about and returning in a leisurely 

 fashion to his own part of the cover." 



Skutch says in his notes: "The brownj female bobolinks remain 

 hidden in the tall grasses and weeds, where it takes sharp eyes to 

 pick them out. As soon as a female makes her appearance, even 

 when she has just been driven from her cover by my passage over the 

 meadow, one or as often two males dash after her, twisting and 

 turning to follow every quick maneuver she makes in her effort to 

 escape their attentions, and not relaxing their hot pursuit until she 

 dives again into the vegetation, all unmindful of the approaching 

 man." 



Du Bois speaks several times in his notes of the male bobolink 

 following him about, perhaps through solicitude for his young or 

 perhaps as an evidence of curiosity. "June 19: This morning when I 

 went over into the Wilkins lot to photograph a yellow warbler's nest, 

 the male bobolink followed me, and 'hung around' to supervise the 

 job, though this place is probably more than a hundred yards from 

 his nest. Later he went away; but when I had made a second photo- 

 graph (after first returning to the house on an errand), and was 

 sitting on a box writing notes, here came the bobolink again. He was 

 carrying something white in his bill (excrement no doubt) which he 

 dropped as he alighted on a small sapling about eighteen feet from me." 



Evidently the male is a good "watchdog." The female is also very 

 alert for approaching danger while she is brooding, which makes it 

 very difficult to flush her directly from the nest. While he was in his 

 blind, close to the nest, and she was brooding the young, "she was 

 very alert, continually looking about, and often stretching up her 

 neck to see over the matted grass which surrounded the nest. In this 

 upstretched position the streaking of her head matched wonderfully 

 well the mixture of dead and green grass blades and stems through 

 which, and against which, I saw her — so well in fact that she was 

 rendered invisible except when she was moving, or when her eye was 

 in plain sight. The male remained on the nearby asparagus almost 

 all the time that his mate was on the nest." 



Forbush (1927) writes of the slaughter in the South: 



Early in September 1912, I left Boston for Georgetown, South Carolina, and 

 remained until after the fifteenth in the coastal region of the state. 1 found that 

 the negroes used two methods of taking the birds: (1) hunting with a gun by- 

 daylight, (2) hunting at night with torches, when the men poled skiffs along the 

 irrigation ditches and picked the dazzled birds off the reeds where they roost, or 



