224 PURPLE GRAKLE. 



wards the middle of that month they begin to sheer off towards 

 the south. The lower parts of Virginia, North and South Car- 

 olina, and Georgia, are the winter residences of these flocks. 

 Here numerous bodies, collecting together from all quarters of 

 the interior and northern districts, and darkening the air with 

 their numbers, sometimes form one congregated multitude of 

 many hundred thousands. A few miles from the banks of the 

 Roanoke, on the twentieth of January, I met with one of those 

 prodigious armies of Grakles. They rose from the surrounding 

 fields with a noise like thunder, and descending on the length 

 of road before me, covered it and the fences completely with 

 black; and when they again rose, and after a few evolutions de- 

 scended on the skirts of the high timbered woods, at that time 

 destitute of leaves, they produced a most singular and striking 

 effect; the whole trees for a considerable extent, from the top 

 to the lowest branches, seeming as if hung in mourning; their 

 notes and screaming the meanwhile resembling the distant sound 

 of a great cataract, but in more musical cadence, swelling and 

 dying away on the ear according to the fluctuation of the breeze- 

 In Kentucky, and all along the Mississippi, from its junction 

 with the Ohio to the Balize, I found numbers of these birds, so 

 that the Purple Grakle may be considered as a very general in- 

 habitant of the territory of the United States. 



Every industrious farmer complains of the mischief commit- 

 ted on his corn by the Crow Blackbirds, as they are usually 

 called; though were the same means used, as with pigeons, to 

 take them in clap-nets, multitudes of them might thus be de- 

 stroyed; and the products of them in market, in some measure 

 indemnify him for their depredations. But they are most nu- 

 merous and most destructive at a time when the various har- 

 vests of the husbandman demand all his attention, and all his 

 hands to cut, cure, and take in; and so they escape with a few 

 sweeps made among them by some of the younger boys, with 

 the gun; and by the gunners from the neighbouring towns and 

 villages; and return from their winter quarters, sometimes ear- 

 ly in March, to renew the like scenes over again. As some 



