64 SONG 



inclement weather will further illustrate the connection between song 

 and the bird's physical condition. 



Singing usually claims all a bird's attention. Some birds, it is true, 

 like the Red-eyed Vireo or Black and White Warbler, sing as they work, 

 but in most instances the bird seeks a point of vantage from which to 

 deliver his message. The Brown Thrasher mounts to the topmost 

 twig of the tallest tree, the Mocker often takes his stand on a chimney, 

 Bob-white mounts to a fence-post^ while most of the song birds of 

 prairie and plain, like the Horned Larks, Pipits, Longspurs and Lark 

 Bunting, for lack of other perch, deliver their songs from the air. 



Other birds, like the Bobolink and Rose-breasted Grosbeak, sing 

 while flying as well as while perching, and observation will show that 

 each species of bird has a more or less well-defined taste in the selection 

 of its song-perch. * 



The flight-song of birds inhabiting treeless regions must not be con- 

 fused with the exceptional and infrequent flight or ecstasy song of 

 certain birds, like the Ovenbird, Water-Thrushes, and Maryland 

 Yellow-throat, which usually sing from a perch, but which, on occasion, 

 bound into the air, rising only a few feet in the case of the Yellow- 

 throat, but a hundred or more with the Seiuri, and on trembling wing 

 utter a hurried, ecstatic outburst of twittering notes wholly unlike their 

 normal song. The Meadowlark has such a flight-song, but in my ex- 

 perience the bird of the plains (Sturnella neglecta) utters it far more 

 frequently than does our eastern Sturnella magna, a variation possibly 

 due to the difference in the nature of their haunts. 



A further study of Meadowlark songs opens the subject of geograph- 

 ical variation in the songs of the same species. Its widely different 

 song is one of the Western Meadowlark's best claims to specific dis- 

 tinctness from the eastern bird, but even among the slightly differ- 

 entiated forms of Sturnella magna, there are striking variations in voice. 

 The songs of some Florida Meadowlarks are scarcely recognizable to 

 one familiar only with the Meadowlark in the north, while the Meadow- 

 lark of Cuba would not be known to him by its notes. 



The 'musical' ear will detect more or less pronounced variations 

 in the voices of other widely distributed species, as they are heard in 

 the various parts of their range, and, in addition to this geographical 

 variation, a variation with age may bfe detected: This is obvious enough 

 with species like the Song Sparrow, the young of which, while still 

 wearing in whole or part their nestling plumage, sing an evidently 

 immature song; and is still apparent with birds like the Orchard Oriole 

 or Indigo Bunting, whose first spring plumage betrays their age and 

 explains why their songs are less finished, less developed than those of 

 the adults of their kind. 



Birds inherit at least the calls they utter when in the nest, just as 

 a child cries instinctively, but they apparently do not inherit their 

 songs any more than the child inherits the language of its parents, and 

 in many recorded instances they have learned the notes of the birds 



