FIELD AND STUDY 



it expressive of joy or happiness? Or is it a natural 

 automatic expression of the male sexual principle — 

 the overflow or surplusage of the breeding-instinct, 

 such as the brilliant colors and strange antics of 

 male birds generally? After the young are hatched 

 this singing of the male will begin to slacken, until 

 shortly before September it stops entirely. The tide 

 of bird-song is usually at its height in June, and it 

 begins to ebb in early July. The rollicking spirit of 

 the bobolink is at this time clouded by care and 

 anxiety about his young, and his song is only heard 

 fitfully and in snatches. As I pass along a road by a 

 meadow where a pair has young, the agitation of 

 both birds is very marked; they publish to the 

 passer-by in every way possible that they have 

 hidden in that timothy grass young that they are 

 very solicitous about. They hover in the air and 

 utter their alarm notes, and if I pause near, the male 

 becomes so excited that a snatch of his song comes 

 out now and then amid his rapidly uttered chiding 

 notes. His joyous level flight on quivering wing 

 changes to the hurried, abrupt, jerky flight of the 

 female. The female bobolink always seems in bad 

 humor, nervous and hurried and out of sorts with 

 the male that so dotes upon her. All his ecstatic 

 singing seems to make no impression upon her; the 

 singer alone seems to joy in it, and to be proud of 

 his performance. ("The song is to the singer and 

 comes back most to him," says Whitman.) Indeed, 



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