Prairie Horned Lark. 9 



pitch. For a time we fail to perceive the hardy musician, 

 uutil a slight movement on a bare knoll in advance of us 

 arrests our wandering glances, and there we see the author 

 of the ventriloquial song to which we have been listening. 

 Having the bird in sight, we can understand why we 

 were so long in discovering it, and why we overlooked it 

 so easily, for the blending colors of its lilac and grayish 

 brown plumage harmonize so closely with the dead vege- 

 tation of the pastures that the bird is difficult to discover 

 by one not acquainted with it. Its upper parts are gray- 

 ish brown, lightly spotted with darker; the upper parts 

 of its head and the sides of its neck and breast are a 

 beautiful vinaceous color, all forming a close mimicry of 

 the ground on which it spends the greater part of its 

 time when it is not on the wing. 



These birds are equally diflScult to perceive in the air 

 or on the ground. When flying, they frequently give 

 utterance to far-borne notes, which at times seem to issue 

 from a point close at hand, and again the birds are appar- 

 ently within a few rods of the listener when they are 

 really overhead skirting the field of vision. Frequently 

 when they are feeding they utter their twittering notes 

 in a soft, far-away tone, which misleads the hearer in esti- 

 mating their distance. I have watched birds feeding near 

 me, and when they "uttered those deceptive notes, with no 

 visible air of delivery and without raising their heads 

 from the vegetation in which they were picking at the 

 rootlets, I have been led to scan the ground farther away 

 to find the other birds that I imagined were attracting 

 my attention. At other times when I have strolled along 

 the border of a meadow, the notes of the prairie horned 

 larks have come to my ear, and I have searched the field 

 of vision to discover the authors. Presently a slight 

 movement on the ground a few feet away would attract 

 my eye, and the larks could be seen feeding or running 

 about, their admirable mimicry of the dried herbage hav- 

 ing protected them from observation until their move- 

 ments betrayed their presence. In our excursions over 

 meadow and field in early spring, we can see the larks 

 feeding on the knolls that are bare of snow, now running 

 prettily ahead for a yard or more, then stopping to glean 



