A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 239 



care that he had when a boy, he would probably find 

 that the world had not deteriorated so much as he 

 is apt to suspect. 



The field or meadow bird, everywhere heard in 

 Kentucky and Illinois, is the black-throated bunt- 

 ing, a heavy-beaked bird the size and color of an 

 English sparrow, with a harsh, rasping song, which 

 it indulges in incessantly. Among bird-songs it is 

 like a rather coarse weed among our wild flowers. 



I could not find the mockingbird in song, though 

 it breeds -in the blue-grass counties. I saw only two 

 specimens of the bird in all my wanderings. The 

 Virginia cardinal was common, and in places the yel- 

 low-breasted chat was heard. Once I heard from 

 across a broad field a burst of bobolink melody from 

 a score or more of throats — a flock of the birds 

 probably pausing on their way north. In Chicago 

 I was told that the Illinois bobolink had a different 

 song from the New England species, but I could 

 detect no essential difl'erence. The song of certain 

 birds, notably that of the bobolink, seems to vary 

 slightly in difi'erent localities, and also to change 

 during a series of years. I no longer hear the exact 

 bobolink song which I heard in my boyhood, in the 

 localities where I then heard it. Not a season passes 

 but I hear marked departures in the songs of our 

 birds from what appears to be the standard song of 

 a given species. 



