AMILY Icterldae. 



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 lY.\a>. thm northward to 

 Great Slave Lake* ; it occurs in western Pennsylvania, N>\\ 

 York, and Massachusetts more or less locally. 



The Bronzed Crackle's note strongly resembles th< 

 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. 



One certainly can not call that music I 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 [fiddle 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 Bird*. 

 72 



