70 U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 211 



she continues to spend long hours in the nest brooding the nearly 

 naked young. 



When the young later become stronger, hardier, and somewhat 

 insulated by feathers, the female spends much less time at the nest 

 and feeds the young no regurgitated food. By the time the young 

 are about 6 dav£ old they are receiving the usual fare of grasshoppers 

 and larvae, plus^round beetles, crickets, and other heavily chitinized 

 insects. During later nest life their hunger must be appeased about 

 every 5 to 10 minutes early and late in the day, and at intervals of 

 about every 15 minutes during the hotter hours. Most of these 

 trips are made by the female, whereas the male makes few visits 

 and is much less solicitous in his attentions to the young. The 

 female averages nearly a hundred trips a day to the nest during 

 the 12 days the young are in the nest. The food daily given each 

 nestling weighs 8 to 20 grams, a weight equivalent to that of about 

 100 to 300 small grasshopper nymphs. Saunders estimates, on the 

 basis of various methods of determination, that a 10-days' supply 

 for 10 nestlings, when the chief food is grasshoppers, would be 5,000 

 to 7,000 grasshoppers. These figures again emphasize the great 

 economic importance of the meadowlark. 



Voice. — The plaintive and very pleasing whistled notes of the 

 meadowlark, heard on its arrival, stand out among my most delight- 

 ful memories of early spring on an Illinois farm. There, where a 

 tall Osage orange tree stood at the edge of a rolling meadow, a meadow- 

 lark came each year to announce his arrival. This song may be 

 rendered by the words Ah-tick-seel-yah or Heetar-see-e-oo, but others 

 have translated it variously such as Spring-o'-the-yeear; Peek-you can't 

 see me; Toodle-te, to-on, etc. There is an infinite number of variations 

 of the territory song, but all have much the same quality. This 

 song is not only the first heard from the meadowlark in spring, but 

 is the one repeated from the singing posts throughout the season. 



The meadowlark is known to alternate the versions of its song. 

 Frances H. Allen (1922) writes of a bird he observed on an April 

 morning: 



He had four or more songs in his repertoire. The first, which was repeated 

 a number of times in succession, resembled the opening notes of the white- 

 crowned sparrow's song, but had three high notes on the same pitch, instead of 

 two, before the lower one — ee-ee-ee-hew . It was a beautiful song and so dif- 

 ferent from anything we commonly hear from the meadowlark that I did not 

 suspect its author at first. * * * then the bird began to alternate this song 

 with another which seemed a good musical complement to it. This second song 

 began low and ended high. It was something like hew-hew-he-hee, the third 

 note shorter than the others. After a few alternations of these two songs the 

 bird dropped the first and sang only the second a number of times, but dropped 

 that in turn and finally took up two or three simpler and more normal songs, 

 of which one, at least, was sweeter than most meadowlark songs. 



