TENTH ORDINARY MEETING: 95 
although it is probable it thus leaves several in different nests. The 
‘birds employed as foster parents are all smaller than the Cow Black- 
‘bird—the Chipping Sparrow, the Maryland Yellow Throat, and 
some of the smaller species of Fly Catcher are among those most 
favoured, the Chipping Sparrow perhaps most frequently with us. 
As the young blackbird grows up it is provided for by its foster 
parents with all the care and assiduity that would be displayed 
towards their own offspring, and long after it has left the nest it 
continues to be fed by its affectionate guardians. 
Frequently where the Chipping Sparrow has been the foster mother 
‘I have seen the tiny little bird carefully placing some choice worm 
or dainty insect in the open mouth of its great clumsy fluttering 
nursling, nearly half as big again as itself, whose sooty brown colour, 
as well as its size, offered a curious contrast to the delicately marked 
plumage and pretty slender form of its foster mother. 
The Marsh Blackbird is well known te all by the extremely hand- 
‘some plumage of the male bird,.and any visitor to the meadows or 
marshes in the neighborhood of the Humber or the Don must be 
familiar with the peculiar song, if song it can be called, of ‘‘ quonk-a- 
ree,” sometimes uttered by half a dozen birds at a time from early 
dawn to midnight. 
The Crow Blackbird or Purple Grakle, Quiscalus purpureus, al- 
though its food consists at some seasons of larve, caterpillars, moths 
and beetles, is the most mischievous to the farmers’ crops of all the 
blackbirds, and is a serious nuisance in some of the localities in 
which they abound.: 
About the 10th or 15th of April, sometimes a few days earlier, if 
‘the season is favourable, the Grass Finch or Bay-winged Bunting, 
Poecetes Gramineus, arrives, and soon makes its presence known by 
its deliciously sweet song, which may be heard all through this and 
the next month in our fields and open pastures and the borders of 
our woods, from “ morn till dewy eve,” being like the robin fond of 
pouring out a last farewell to the closing day. Its neatly built nest 
‘placed usually under a tussock of grass, constructed of fine grasses 
and roots bent and twined together, and the whole lined with hair- 
like roots and grass, may be met with in the open pastures or fields, 
sometimes as early as the end of April or the first week in May. 
As the month advances fresh notes from new arrivals continually 
2 
