‘AMILY Icteride. 
lustrous sheen of the male, the back and under parts 
brown without iridescence. Nest generally in pines or 
spruces, compactly built of mud and coarse grasses, lined 
with finer grasses; usually twenty to thirty feet from 
the ground. Egg variable, pale blue, or blue-green 
blotched and scrawled with light and dark brown. The 
range of the bird is from Labrador southwest to the 
lower Mississippi Valley (on the west slope of the Alle- 
ghanies only), and thence to Texas, then northward to 
Great Slave Lake*; it occurs in western Pennsylvania, New 
York, and Massachusetts more or less locally. 
The Bronzed Grackle’s note strongly resembles the 
noise of a squeaky hinge on an iron gate! The bird has 
no song, and there is no music in his harsh conversa- 
tional chatterings. If one takes a sheet of note paper 
and whistles an octave against its edge, the quality of the 
tones produced, with their wide interval, closely imitates 
the Grackle’s best note. 
NIN 
== 
One certainly can not call that music! The other queer 
noises sound like rattling shutters, watchmen’s rattles. 
ungreased cart wheels, vibrating wire springs, broken 
piano wires, the squeak of a chair moved on a hardwood 
floor, the chink of broken glass, the scrape of the bow on 
a tfiddle string, and the rest of those discords which 
commonly play havoc with one’s nerves! Evidently 
when nature’s orchestra was tuning for the Spring 
Symphony, the Grackle failed to screw up his vocal 
cords to the proper pitch. 
The birds are gregarious even during the nesting sea- 
son, and in spring and summer seem to be equally busy 
“ploughing up” the earth in the already broken field 
with their long, crowlike bills; naturally such action 
creates trouble with the farmer, but on the whole, an 
examination of the constituents of the bird’s diet, shows 
*Vide Chapman’s Handbook of Birds. 
72 
