TENTH OtlDINARY MEETING. 95 



although it is probable it thus leaves several in different nests. The 

 birds employed as foster parents are all smaller than the Cow Black- 

 bird — the Chipping Sparrow, the Maryland Yellow Throat, and 

 some of the smaller species of Fly Catcher are among those most 

 favoured, the Chipping Sparrow perhaj^s most frequently with \is. 

 As the young blackbird grows up it is provided for by its foster 

 parents with all the care and assiduity that would be displayed 

 towards their own offspring, and long after it has left the nest it 

 continues to be fed by its affectionate guardians. 



Frequently where the Chipping Sparrow has been the foster mother 

 I have seen the tiny little bird carefully placing some choice worm 

 or dainty insect in the open mouth of its great clumsy fluttering 

 nursling, nearly half as big again as itself, whose sooty brown colour, 

 as well as its size, offered a curious contrast to the delicately marked 

 plumage and pretty slender form of its foster mother. 



The Marsh Blackbird is well known to all by the extremely hand- 

 some plumage of the male bird, and any visitor to the meadows or 

 marshes in the neighborhood of the Humber or the Don must be 

 familiar with the peculiar song, if song it can be called, of ' ' quonk-a- 

 ree," sometimes uttered by half a dozen birds at a time from early 

 dawn to midnight. 



The Crow Blackbird or Purple Grakle, Quiscalus purpureus, al- 

 though its food consists at some seasons of larvae, caterpillars, moths 

 and beetles, is the most mischievous to the farmers' crops of all the 

 blackbirds, and is a serious nuisance in some of the localities in 

 which they abound. 



About the 10th or 15th of April, sometimes a few days earlier, if 

 the season is favourable, the Grass Finch or Bay- winged Bunting, 

 Pocecetes Gramineus, arrives, and soon makes its presence known by 

 its deliciously sweet song, which may be heard all through this and 

 the next month in our fields and open pastures and the borders of 

 our woods, from " morn till dewy eve," being like the robin fond of 

 poui'ing out a last farewell to the closing day. Its neatly built nest 

 placed usually under a tussock of grass, constructed of fine grasses 

 and roots bent and twined together, -and the whole lined with hair, 

 like roots and grass, may be met with in the open pastures or fields, 

 sometimes as early as the end of Api'il or the first week in May. 

 As the month advances fresh notes from new arrivals continually 

 2 



