BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 243 



are seldom seen about their breeding grounds excepting in the early morning 

 and late afternoon. At most other hours of the day they frequent open and 

 often elevated farming country, where they feed chiefly in grain stubbles and 

 weed-grown fields. When disturbed at their repasts they fly to the nearest de- 

 ciduous trees and immediately after alighting burst into a medley of tumultuous 

 song, inexpressibly wild and pleasing when heard at a distance, but rather over- 

 whelming if the flock be a large one and close at hand. I remember when the 

 birds often indulged in these delightful concerts in apple orchards near our house 

 in Cambridge and when they were always to be heard, at the right season, in the 

 fields bordering Vassall Lane, but that was many years ago. After the female 

 I^edwings arrive (I seldom see them before the first week of May) the males 

 spend most of the time with them in the swamps and marshes, but even at 

 the height of the breeding season it is by no means unusual to find birds of 

 both sexes feeding, in flocks, in dry, upland fields. 



In the Cambridge Region the nest of the Red-winged Blackbird is almost 

 invariably built in some wet or, at least, very moist place and usually in the top 

 of a low bush; between the stems of a cluster of cattail flags; in a bed of rank 

 grass; or in the crown of one of the curious little mounds formed by the tussock 

 sedge {Cairx stricta). I learn from Mr. C. F. Batchelder, however, that on 

 June 17, 1877, he found a nest containing young, in "a vertical fork of a small 

 apple tree ' ' in an orchard lying at some distance from any swampy land but not 

 far from the shores of Fresh Pond. 



In July and August our Redwings congregate, sometimes by hundreds, in 

 the Fresh Pond Swamps where, in company with Cowbirds and Bobolinks, they 

 feed on the seeds of the wild rice and other semi-aquatic plants which flourish 

 about the borders of ponds and ditches. They used to resort in smaller numbers, 

 at the same season, to the Longfellow Marshes, where I suspect they also bred 

 occasionally, for in May and June I have seen birds, which acted as if they had 

 eggs or young, flying about over brackish pools in the neighborhood of the Cam- 

 bridge Cemetery. 



Most of our Redwings depart for the south before the close of August (an 

 interesting fact in view of the early dates at which they arrive in spring), but 

 they may be sometimes met with in small, straggling troops in September and 

 October, and since 1889 ^ a very few (the number varying from one or two to six 

 or eight) have been seen nearly every winter — often in January and February, 

 when the cold was intense and the ground deeply covered with snow — at Pout 

 Pond. They usually appear here about sunset, and evidently pass the night in 

 the shelter afforded by some dense bushes and matted beds of cattail flags. 

 Just how and where they obtain food at this season is not known to me. 



' H. M. Spelman, Auk, VII, 1890, 288-289. R- S- Eustis, Auk, XIX, 1902, 204. 



