652 U.S. NATIONAL MUSEUM BULLETIN 23 7 tart 2 



ceases to sing from some lowly perch. I have often seen three or four 

 birds fly toward each other, mount together, pour out their hearts in 

 friendly rivalry, then separate, each sailing and singing to his own 

 territory. The Bunting's song is highly inspiring whether sung solo 

 or ensemble. Surely this prairie bird must be ranked as one of our 

 very best feathered songsters." 



Attempts have been made to render the song in human words; how- 

 ever, such attempts usually give only an impression of the rhythm, 

 not of the musical quality of the song. Gerbracht (1944) describes 

 the singing of the lark bunting in this way: "Most birds slip in quietly, 

 but everyone knows when the buntings arrive. Everybody is glad 

 to see them, for they are the answer to the things everybody wants 

 to know, as they are both measuring stick and seasonal synchronizers. 

 Just as the meadowlark says, 'Time to sow wheat; time to sow wheat,' 

 the bunting says, 'Click, click, click, get busy, busy, busy, plant corn, 

 corn, corn, wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, click, click.' " 



Field marks. — The adult male lark bunting in spring plumage is a 

 wholly black or dark slate color except for conspicuous white patches 

 on the wing. Although one would expect that so strikingly marked 

 a bird would rarely be misidentified, where the ranges of the two bh*ds 

 tend to overlap, the lark bunting and bobolink are not infrequently 

 mistaken for each other (cf. Cameron, 1908; Tout, 1936). The adult 

 female in spring plumage is much less striking, being a grayish-brown 

 above and nearly white below and streaked with dusky both above 

 and below. The wing patch in the female is smaller and is tinged with 

 buffy. In the fall, all ages and sexes look much alike, resembling the 

 adult female. 



Enemies. — There is little doubt that the breaking up of the prairies 

 and their intensive cultivation in Minnesota, western Iowa, and ex- 

 treme eastern Nebraska and South Dakota have largely driven the 

 lark bunting out of these areas as a breeding bird. In addition man 

 in his speeding automobile undoubtedly takes an additional toU of 

 lark buntings along the highways during migration. Baumgartner 

 (1934) reports finding dead lark buntings on the highways in both 

 Kansas and Colorado. Both in spring and fall migrations, lark bunt- 

 ings are common along the roadsides and, although the flushed birds 

 tend to fly away from the highway, inevitably a few fly into the path 

 of the automobile. 



Inasmuch as the lark buntings are late migrants, they are not gen- 

 erally susceptible to the vagaries of springtime weather in the central 

 plains. However, occasional late spring snowstorms trap large 

 numbers. One such storm was that on May 28-29, 1947, in north- 

 western Nebraska, which dumped more than a foot of heavy, wet 

 snow on the ground and brought temperatures down to 18° F. or lower. 



