224 NORTH AMERICAN BIRDS. 



planters. In the early season they seek their food among the large salt 

 marshes of the seaboard, and along the muddy banks of creeks and rivers. 

 They do great damage to the rice plantations, both when the grain is in the 

 soft state and afterwards when the ripened grain is stacked. They also feed 

 very largely upon the small crabs called fiddlers, so common in all the mud 

 flats, earthworms, various insects, shrimps, and other aquatic forms of the 

 like character. 



A few of these birds are resident throughout the year, though the 

 greater part retire farther south during a portion of tlie winter. They 

 return in February, in full plumage, when they mate. They resort, by pairs 

 and in companies, to certain favorite breeding-places, wliere they begin to 

 construct their nests. They do not, however, even in Florida, begin to breed 

 before April. They build a large and clumsy nest, made of very coarse 

 and miscellaneous materials, chiefly sticks and fragments of dry weeds, 

 sedges, and strips of bark, lined with finer stems, fibrous roots, and gi'asses, 

 and have from three to five egus. 



It is a very singular but well-established characteristic of this species, 

 that no sooner is their nest completed and incubation commenced than the 

 male birds all desert their mates, and, joining one another in flocks, keep 

 apart from the females, feeding by themselves, until they are joined by the 

 young birds and their mothers in the fall. 



These facts and this trait of character in this species have been fully con- 

 firmed by the observations of Dr. Bachman of Charleston. In 1832 he 

 visited a breeding-locality of these birds. On a single Smilax bush he found 

 more than thirty nests of the Grakles, from three to five feet apart, some 

 of them not more than fifteen inches above the water, and only females were 

 seen about the nests, no males making their appearance. Dr. Bachman also 

 visited colonies of these nests placed upon live-oak trees thirty or forty feet 

 from the ground, and carefully w^atched the manners of the old birds, but 

 has never found any males in the vicinity of their nests after the eggs had 

 been laid. They always keep at a distance, feeding in flocks in the marshes, 

 leaving the females to take charge of their nests and young. They have but 

 one brood in a season. 



As these birds fly, in loose flocks, they continually utter a peculiar cry, 

 which Mr. Audubon states resembles or may be represented by hirrick, crick, 

 crick. Their usual notes are harsh, resembling loud, shrill Mdiistles, and are 

 frequently accompanied with their ordinary cry of crick-crick-cree. In the 

 love-season these notes are said to be more pleasing, and are changed into 

 sounds which Audubon states resemble tirit, tirit, titiri-titiri-titiree, rising 

 from low to high with great regularity and emphasis. The cry of the young 

 bird, when just able to fly, he compares to the whistling cry of some kind 

 of frogs. 



The males are charged by Mr. Audul)on with attacking birds of other 

 species, driving them from their nests and sucking their eggs. 



