THE MEADOW-LARK. 343 
and complaint; and, as the alarm passes along the country, 
sometimes as many as a dozen or twenty birds are hovering 
over him, scolding vociferously. ; 
Two broods are usually reared in the season: as soon as 
the last brood leaves the nest, the whole family joins with 
its neighbors into a flock of sometimes a hundred or hun- 
dred and fifty or more. They then visit the grain-fields, and 
inflict considerable damage by eating and destroying the 
grain. In many localities, they are so numerous at this 
season, that they are a serious nuisance; and the farmers 
destroy great numbers of them with poison and with the 
gun. 
Localities in the neighborhood of the seaboard are thus 
afflicted more than others; and I have seen flocks of these 
birds in Plymouth County, Mass., containing as many as a 
thousand individuals. 
About the last of October, they depart on their southern 
migration. 
STURNELLA, Viert1or 
Sturnella, Vrr1uLot, Analyse (1816). (Type Alauda magna, L.) 
Body thick, stout; legs large, toes reaching beyond the tail; tail short, even, 
with narrow acuminate feathers; bill slender, elongated; length about three times 
the height; commissure straight from the basal angle; culmen flattened basally, 
extending backwards, and parting the frontal feathers; longer than the head, but 
shorter than tarsus; nostrils linear, covered by an incumbent membranous scale; 
inner lateral toe longer than the outer, but not reaching to basal joint of middle; 
hind toe a little shorter than the middle, which is equal to the tarsus; hind claw 
nearly twice as long as the middle; feathers of head stiffened and bristly; the 
shafts of those above extended into a black seta; tertiaries nearly equal to the 
primaries; feathers above all transversely banded; beneath yellow, with a black 
pectoral crescent. 
STURNELLA MAGNA. — Swainson. 
The Meadow-lark; Old Field-lark. 
Alauda magna, Linneus. Syst. Nat., I. (1758) 167, 10th ed. (based on Alauda 
magna, Catesby, tab. 33). Wils. Am. Orn., III. (1811) 20. 
Sturnella magna, Swainson. Phil. Mag., I. (1827) 436. 
Sturnus Ludoviciants, Audubon. Orn. Biog., IT. (1834) 216; V. (1839) 492. 
Sturnella Ludoviciana, Nuttall. Man., I. (1832) 147. 
