236 NOTES ON THE 
ric-ah, hurric ah, repeated all the way from two or three, to 
seven or eight times in rather deliberate succession. But their 
common habits are too well known to require, or justify an 
attempt to describe them in a report which aims principally to 
establish identity, and characteristic local habits, more especi- 
ally of less familiar species. 
Sometimes they levy a modest toll upon the shocks and 
stacks of the farmer, and thus come under the shadow of his 
anathemas, but their destruction of insects and worms is too 
invaluable to bring them absolutely under his proscription. 
SPECIFIC CHARACTERS. ' 
Shafts, under surfaces of wings, and tail feathers, gamboge- 
yellow; a black patch on each cheek; a red crescent on the 
nape; throat, and stripe beneath the eye, pale. lilac brown; 
back glossed with olivaceous green; a crescentic patch on the 
breast, and rounded spots on the belly, black; back and wing 
coverts with interrupted transverse bands of black; neck above 
and sides ashy; bill slender, depressed at base, compressed; 
culmen much curved; pointed, but not truncate; nostrils basal, 
medium, oval, exposed; feet large; tail long, exceeding the 
secondaries, feathers acuminate. 
Length, 12.50; wing, 6. 
Habitat. northern and eastern North America, west to the 
eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and Alaska. Occasional 
on the Pacific slope from California northward. 
