128 THE Birps Asout Us. 
with its few peculiarly liquid notes. The female is a 
nonentity in appearance, and would be in fact, were 
it not that it is too lazy, too ignorant, or too awkward 
to build itself a nest and look after it, but having an 
egg to dispose of, drops it in the nest of some other 
bird and thinks no more about it. It puts one alittle 
out of patience with evolution that any victim of the 
cow-bird should be willing to accept the situation, 
and not only hatch but rear the foundling. A single 
year’s protest would annihilate the species, and they 
would never be missed. This is a little hard on 
them, perhaps, but, seen at any time and under any 
circumstances, they can hardly be considered as in- 
teresting, unless it is in autumn when they congre- 
gate in quite large flocks, and if the day be windy 
they seem to be blown about like a windrow of dead 
leaves. They are migratory after a fashion, coming 
in March and sometimes quite early in the month, 
and are often in the low meadows along the Dela- 
ware River as late as the middle of November. In- 
deed, Indian summer seems to be a favorite time 
with them, and they have an amount of animation 
then that seems unnatural, a sort of intoxication. 
In the Southwest this bird is replaced by the 
“ Bronzed Cow-bird,” which seems a strange distinc- 
tion, as our Eastern bird, in spring at least, is about 
as “bronzy” as it well can be. 
In Western North America, in marshes, east, regu- 
larly to Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, and Texas, we 
have the Yellow-headed Blackbird. It is “acci- 
dental” in Pennsylvania, and even gets as far away 
from home as Massachusetts. 
