130 Birds of Lakeside and Prairie 



of southeastern Texas. Nothing surprised me more than to 

 find the meadowlarks there in abundance, and making their 

 habitation in the woods. The woods were open, to be sure, 

 but the surroundings were totally unlike those which the lark 

 seeks in its Northern summer home. 



The horned or shore lark is another common bird of the 

 open prairies. There are two varieties, the horned lark 

 proper, and the prairie horned lark. Both of the birds occur 

 in the Middle Western states. They sing on the wing, but 

 their notes, while not absolutely unmusical, have but little to 

 commend them to the ear. With one exception, my experi- 

 ence with these larks has been that, apart from the breeding 

 season, they go in small detached flocks. The one exception 

 was the sight of a flock of the birds flying above a great field 

 about sixty miles south of Chicago. I don't dare venture to 

 give an estimate of the number of individuals in the gathering. 

 The old comparison of the swarm of gnats is too weak to 

 hold. No flock of blackbirds that I have ever seen equaled 

 in size this gathering of the larks. The birds were constantly 

 going to the ground in mass, and then rising again in a sort of 

 hovering flight. Every lark in the vast concourse was singing 

 its twittering song. It was the last week in March, and 

 before three weeks had passed the birds had separated and 

 many of them were nesting. On April 15th I found a nest 

 containing five eggs on the ground within a few feet of a pool 

 of water, the surface of which was frozen. I flushed the 

 lark from the nest, and after taking one fleeting glimpse 

 at her egg treasures, I went hastily away. The bird was 

 back covering the eggs before I had gone a distance of ten 

 feet in my retreat. How the horned larks, building as early 

 as they do, manage to bring up such a numerous progeny 



