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voice certainly has a meaning from his vantage 

 in the tree-tops. It is emphatically a cry of 

 warning, uttered loud enough for every feather 

 in the forest to hear, that an enemy is intruding 

 upon the sacred domain. His crest of sapphire 

 would atone for his shrill clarion, were not the 

 meaning of his cry a sufficient excuse in itself. 

 The grackle, on the other hand, only screams 

 incessantly to hear himself scream, and to drown 

 the voices of the song-birds. 



In Harris's " Treatise on Insects injurious to 

 Vegetation," the crow-blackbird is made to pose 

 as a public benefactor. The reader, at first 

 shocked by the statement that " few persons, 

 while indulging in the luxury of early green 

 peas, are aware how many insects they uncon- 

 sciously swallow," is somewhat relieved later on 

 by being told that these " buggy peas " contain, 

 in the first instance, a minute whitish grub, 

 which larva is changed to a pupa within its hole 

 in the pea in the autumn, and before spring 

 casts its skin again, becoming a beetle (Bruchus 

 ptsi), only to fly out into the awaiting maw 

 of the crow-blackbird ! " Buggy peas," I admit, 

 do not sound appetizing at first hearing ; still, 

 were we to draw the line at such trifles, I fear 

 our vegetable diet would necessarily be greatly 

 restricted. So long as we eat the insects with 



