280 NOTES ON THE 
STURNELLA MAGNA NEGLECTA (AupuBoN). (5010. ) 
WESTERN MEADOW LARK. 
This species has been occasionally obtained in the Red river 
valley for the last fifteen years, but is still rare. It has been 
collected as far down as the Indian Reserve in Pipestone 
county. I am very familiar with this bird, and its various 
modifications of song as exhibited in the mountains, foot hills 
and valleys of California where I spent about two years in the 
enjoyment of special facilities for observing them, as I was 
making a collection of the birds from Trucker to Sonoma and 
south to San Diego in 1871-2. 
SPECIFIC CHARACTERS. 
Feathers above dark brown, margined with brownish-white, 
with a terminal blotch of pale reddish-brown; exposed portion 
of wings and tail with transverse bands, which in the latter 
are completely isolated from each other, narrow and linear; 
beneath yellow, with a black pectoral crescent; yellow of the 
throat extending on the sides of the maxilla; sides, crissum, 
and tibia, very pale reddish-brown, or nearly white, streaked 
with blackish; head with a light median, and superciliary 
stripe, the latter yellow in front of the eye, a blackish line 
behind it; the transverse bars on the feathers above (less so 
on the tail) with a tendency to become confluent near the 
exterior margin. 
Length, 10; wing, 5.25; tail, 3.25; bill, 1.25. 
Habitat, western United States from Wisconsin, Minnesota, 
Iowa to Pacific coast. 
ICTERUS SPURIUS (L.). (506.) 
ORCHARD ORIOLE. 
This is a fairly common summer resident, arriving about the 
middle of May and retiring southward about the first of Sep- 
tember. Its song is clear, strong and thrush-like in melody. 
The nests are usually constructed and incubation commenced 
by the second week in June, and occasionally a little earlier. 
The structure consists of green or nearly fresh wiry grasses 
compactly woven and lined with finer grasses, inner bark of 
coarse weeds and coarse hairs of cattle and horses. It is 
usually suspended from a fork in a limb from seven to ten or 
twelve feet from the ground. In the absence of the orchards, 
from which it has received its common name in the east and 
south, it seems to prefer a low tree of almost any species of 
timber if somewhere about the size of a matured apple tree 
and located on a somewhat elevated, dry sidehill with no rela- 
tion to approximate water. 4 
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