LAND BIRDS. 441 
are more or less gregarious even when nesting, and in favorable localities 
scores, or even hundreds, of nests may be found placed here and there at 
intervals of but a few yards, sometimes only five or ten feet apart. 
The song, if it can be called such, commonly consists of three syllables 
which Emerson writes ‘‘o-ka-lee,” and Samuels as “‘ quonk-a-ree.”’ Nehrling 
writes this “con-cur-ee,” and calls its whistling note “tii-tii.”’ This 
whistle is one of the clearest and most penetrating of bird-calls and in clear 
weather can be heard at great distances. When one is collecting in a marsh 
where Red-wings are nesting in numbers this persistent and powerful 
Fig. 101. Red-winged Blackbird. Young about five days from nest. 
Photograph from mounted specimen. (Original.) 
whistle becomes so monotonous and yet so painful to a sensitive ear that 
at length the irritation becomes.almost unbearable. 
As soon as the young are able to fly the birds gather into larger or smaller 
flocks and begin to forage on the cultivated fields in the vicinity, retiring 
at night to the cattail marshes to roost. It is at this time that the greatest 
harm is done to grain, for the birds sometimes assemble in flocks of twenty 
to fifty thousand and are capable of inflicting heavy damage upon oats or 
wheat. This has been more particularly the case in the past, for in the early 
history of the state the breeding grounds of the blackbirds were extra- 
ordinarily abundant and the grain fields were few and far between. Thus 
an immense blackbird population was likely to concentrate on a small 
acreage of grain, naturally with disastrous results. The steady increase 
in the area of cultivated lands, and perhaps more especially the drainage 
of a large part of the swamps and marshes, has changed these conditions 
completely; at present not nearly as many blackbirds are reared in the state 
