WESTERN MEADOWLARK 93 



recall the songs to one who has heard them. One of the best of these 

 is written by Dawson and Bowles (1909): "One boisterous spirit in 

 Chelan I shall never forget for he insisted on shouting, hour after hour, 

 and day after day, 'Hip! Hip! Hurrah! boys; three cheers'!." And 

 Fred J. Pierce (1921) describes what he calls a one-sided imaginary 

 conversation: "We see the Meadowlark standing on a post repeating, 

 'Oh, yes, I am a pretty-little-bird' (the 'pretty-little-bird' winds up with 

 a trill). In a moment he saj^s, 'I'm going to-eat pretty-soon.' Then, 

 suiting the action to the word, he drops out of sight into the grass, 

 and presently we hear him say, '/ cut 'im clean off, I cut 'im clean of 

 (this is often followed by 'Yup'). He flies back to his perch with a 

 bug in his bill, and when he has deliberately eaten it, he — in a fast, 

 sing-song and unmusical voice — says, 'It makes me feel very good.' " 

 Fanciful as these renderings are, they do suggest the song. 



Claude T. Barnes writes to me from Utah that, on April 10, 1925, 

 he "heard a meadowlark give the song 'Tra la la traleek'; the 'traleek' 

 was a jumble of sounds, short, emphatic. Rising into the air, it sang, 

 while a-wing, a song quite like that of the bobolink, then alighted on 

 a post and uttered occasionally the first song. After a while, it sang 

 the common 'U-tah's a pretty place'." He has heard the bird singing 

 at midnight, and others have said that it sings at all hours of the day 

 and night, though mainly in the early morning. Weather makes very 

 little difference; it sings in sunshine, rain, wind or snow. It is also a 

 very persistent singer. Linsdale (1938), writing of the birds of the 

 Great Basin, says: 



The songs of nieadowlarks were conspicuous among the sounds in the inhabited 

 areas. Usually they were given from some rather high perch. One, on the 

 morning of May 25, 1932, sang 22 times in 3 minutes: 8, 7, and 7 times each minute. 

 It then uttered 3 single whistles and moved about 75 yards to another perch 

 where it resumed singing. Another on June 6, 1933, sang 10 times in 1J4 minutes; 

 7 times the first minute. 



One type of song was given regularly in flight. The singing bird would rise 

 gradually in a straight line and then drop abruptly. One that was watched flew 

 up 75 to 100 feet, at a 45° angle, singing on rapidly beating wings, and went 

 down 50 to 75 yards away. 



Albert R. Brand (1938) in his study of vibration frequencies of 

 birds' songs gives the western meadowlark a low-pitch rating; he 

 recorded an approximate mean of 2,500 vibrations per second for this 

 bird, and only 3,475 for the highest note and 1,475 for the lowest; 

 this latter figure is lower than for any other passerine bird tested, 

 except the catbird, crow, starling, yellow-breasted chat, and eastern 

 red-wing, and twice as low as for the eastern meadowlark. 



Field marks. — This species can be easily recognized as a meadow- 

 lark by its three well-known characters, white lateral tail feathers, 

 yellow breast, and black crescent, but there is no visible character by 



