156 



THE COMMON CROW-BLACKBIRD. 



in their a^^mnal and changed dress, hardly now known as the 

 same spec.oa, they sometimes show their taste for plunder, and flock 

 together like the greedy and predatory Blackbirds. 



THE COMMON CROW-BLACKBIRD. 



This very common bird is an occasional or constant resident in 

 every part of America, from Hudson's Bay and the northern interior 

 to the great Antilles, within the tropic. In most parts of this wide 

 region they also breed, at least from Nova Scotia to Louisiana, and 

 probably farther south. Into the States north of Virginia they begin 

 to migrate from the beginning of March to May, leaving those coun- 

 tries again in numerous troops about the middle of November. Thus 

 assembled from the north and west in increasing numbers, they 

 wholly overrun, at times, the warmer maritime regions, where they 

 assemble to pass the winter in the company of their well known 

 cousins the Red- winged Troopials or Blackbirds; for both, impelled 

 by the same predatory appetite, and love of comfortable winter quar- 

 ters, are often 

 thus accident- 

 ally associated 

 in the plun- 

 dering and 

 gleaning of 

 the planta- 

 tions. The 

 amazing num- 

 bers in which 

 the present 

 species associ- 

 ate are almost 

 incredible. 

 Wilson relates 

 that on the 

 20th of Janu- 

 ary, a few 

 miles from the 

 banks of the 

 Roanoke in 



Virginia, he met with one of those prodigious armies of Blackbirds, 

 vhich, as he approached, rose from the surrounding fields with a 

 noise like thunder, and descending on the stretch of road before him, 

 covered it and the fences completely with black; rising again, after a 

 few evolutions, they descended on the skirt of a leafless wood, so thick 

 as to give the whole forest, for a considerable extent the appearance 

 .of being shrouded in mourning, the numbers amounting probably to 

 many hundreds of thousands. Their notes and screams resembled 

 the distant sound of a mighty cataract, but strangely attuned into a 



CKOW !!!, VCKIUK.il. 



