90 BIRDS AND POETS 
during the breeding season, and associated with 
clover and daisies and buttercups as no other bird 
is, he yet has the look of an interloper or a new- 
comer, and not of one to the manner born. 
The bobolink has an unusually full throat, which 
may help account for his great power of song. No 
bird has yet been found that could imitate him, or 
even repeat or suggest a single note, as if his song 
were the product of a new set of organs. There is 
a vibration about it, and a rapid running over the 
keys, that is the despair of other songsters. It is 
said that the mockingbird is dumb in the presence 
of the bobolink. My neighbor has an English sky- 
lark that was hatched and reared in captivity. The 
bird is a most persistent and vociferous songster, 
and fully as successful a mimic as the mockingbird. 
It pours out a strain that is a regular mosaic of 
nearly all the bird-notes to be heard, its own proper 
lark song forming a kind of bordering for the whole. 
The notes of the phebe-bird, the purple finch, the 
swallow, the yellowbird, the kingbird, the robin, 
and others, are rendered with perfect distinctness 
and accuracy, but not a word of the bobolink’s, 
though the lark must have heard its song every day 
for four successive summers. It was the one con- 
spicuous note in the fields around that the lark 
made no attempt to plagiarize. He could not steal 
the bobolink’s thunder. 
The lark is only a more marvelous songster than 
the bobolink on account of his soaring flight and 
the sustained copiousness of his song. His note is 
