42 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louts 
worthy of note, but until now they have never been carefully 
described or transcribed fully into words. 
Wilson (1831) wrote of O. a. alpestris ‘‘They are said to sing 
well, mounting in the air in the manner of the Skylark of 
Europe .. .’’. Audubon heard this same bird in Labrador and 
gives the following description: ‘‘The male bird sings sweetly 
while on the wing, although its song is comparatively short. It 
springs from the moss or naked rock obliquely, for about forty 
yards, begins and ends its madrigal, then performs a few irregu- 
lar evolutions, and returns to the ground. There also it sings, 
but less frequently and with less fullness. Its call note is quite 
mellow and altered at times in ventriloqual manner, so different, 
as to seem like that of another species.’’ As will be shown later 
the Prairie Horned Lark sings for several minutes while in the 
air, flies much higher than forty yards and returns to the ground 
by one long straight drop. But O. a. alpestris may be quite 
different from O. a. praticola in this respect for recently (1926) 
Demille described the song of O. a. alpestris on the Gaspe penin- 
sula thus: ‘‘The male flies straight upward for fifty or a 
hundred feet as the song begins, flutters a second as he hangs 
suspended and drops suddenly to the ground with the song’s 
conclusion’’. These two descriptions are at considerable variance 
with the song of the Prairie Horned Lark as will be evident 
shortly. 
Ornithologists so intent on robbing a bird of its eggs or upon 
collecting the bird itself could scarcely be expected to listen 
attentively to the song of that bird, so it is not surprising that 
the first adequate description of the song of the Lark should 
come from the Rev. J. Hibbert Langille near the close of the 
19th century (1892). Though he spoke of ‘‘Eremophila alpes- 
tris’’ his bird was undoubtedly the Prairie Horned Lark. His 
description is, in part, as follows: ‘‘Presently I caught the 
way of the sound, and lo! its author was soaring high in the air, 
moving in short curves up, up, singing for a few minutes as it 
sailed with expanded wings before each flitting eurve upward, 
till it became a mere speck in the zenith, and finally I could 
scarcely tell whether I saw it or not. But I still heard the 
song . . . one is tempted to compare it with the squeaking of 
an ungreased wheelbarrow. ‘Quit, quit, quit, you silly rig and 
get away’, it seems to say: the first three or four syllables being 
