In Marsh and Swamp. 309 



The birds build generally in marshes, where the nests are attached to 

 reeds. They are built of leaves, coarse grasses, and bits of marsh plants 

 and lined with finer grasses. Four or five eggs are laid. These vary from 

 white or grayish white to greenish white and are evenly specked with vary- 

 ing shades of brown. They are rather more than an inch long and nearly 

 three quarters of an inch in their other diameter. 



Yellow-headed Blackbirds are gregarious, even during the breeding sea- 

 son, at which times they are associated in small communities. During other 

 parts of the year they are often congregated in enormous flocks, roosting in 

 swamps and marshes and dispersing over the fields during the day, and often 

 visiting the barnyards where cattle are kept. The birds are chiefly of West- 

 ern North America, migrating as far north as Manitoba and south to the 

 Valley of Mexico. They are found regularly east as far as Wisconsin and 

 Illinois, and have been recorded as stragglers from Massachusetts, the Dis- 

 trict of Columbia, South Carolina, and Florida. 



The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is the largest of North American Wood- 

 peckers. It is a truly magnificent and remarkable bird, and is an inhabitant 



of the great wooded swamp areas of the more southern 

 Ivory-billed Wood- c ^ ' 



oecker States, by no means as rare as many suppose, the dis- 



campephiius principals tribution of the bird is quite local. A few years ago in 

 Florida I saw eleven of these birds together, working on 

 a piece of girdled timber near a cypress swamp. The trees were dead and 

 sufficiently decayed to offer fine feeding ground for the larvae of a kind of 

 large boring beetle. This kind of food is much sought after by these giant 

 Woodpeckers, and so fertile a hunting ground doubtless had attracted all of 

 the birds living near. Their call notes, kate, kate, kate, were constantly 

 uttered, and with their ceaseless hammering, and the flying of large de- 

 tached chips, made a busy and noisy scene never to be forgotten. 



Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are about twenty inches long, and their pre- 

 vailing colors are black and white. They have a very conspicuous and 

 pointed recurved crest on the head, which is bright scarlet in the adult male, 

 and black, with sometimes an admixture of a few scarlet feathers on the fore- 

 head, in the female. A broad white stripe starting below each eye passes 

 down the side of the neck and the two meet on the back. There is a large 

 and conspicuous patch of white on each wing. The bill is white and the eyes 

 are pale yellow. 



