NATURAL HISTORY. 



55 



slip along beneath the waving, green tops, 

 unperceived by the human eye. 



The sojourn of the bobolink with us is 

 short, and he is the first bird to leave the 

 choir. Being a good little patriot, he waits 

 for the Fourth of July celebration. Then 

 he retires to the marshes, with scores of 

 his own kind, and emerges in August a 

 changed bird. In his place of seclusion he 

 has left his entrancing voice and gay at- 

 tire, and donned a traveling suit of brown, 

 with a little yellow and white trimming, 

 and a striped Tarn o' Shanter. He can 

 hardly be distinguished from his mate, who 

 always wears a plain suit to avoid being 

 conspicuous. The migratory spirit is upon 

 him, and a long journey is in prospect, so 

 he tries to tell us all about it, with his lit- 

 tle metallic note of farewell, "Chink, tink, 

 tink, chink." For a time he lingers among 

 the wild rice swamps, and is known as the 

 reed bird ; but the autumn winds have 

 whispered to him that the rice fields of 

 South Carolina and Georgia are in per- 

 fection. The tall stalks of grain are "in 

 the milk," and no daintier food could be 

 desired by the most fastidious bobolink. 

 Even those far off in Utah come back by 

 way of the East, and travel South by the 

 old pathway. What is this strange migra- 

 tory instinct which Nature bestows on her 

 winged children, which prompts these 

 feathered mites to journey thousands of 

 miles each year without chart or guide? 



Our New England bobolink joins those 

 of his kind, and together they travel, high 

 above the earth, toward the South. Flocks 

 of these sober, little brown birds arrive at 

 the rice plantations, and though gunners 

 and minders are there to frighten them off, 

 yet the destruction to the crops is so great 

 that the loss reaches millions of dollars an- 

 nually to the planters. Some of the planters 

 consume ioo pounds of gunpowder a day, 

 often with only blank cartridges, to drive 

 away these depredators. Fires are kept 

 burning at night, but all in vain, for rice 

 birds will risk their lives for a good meal. 

 Of course, many a rice bird, or ortolan, 

 as he is now called, is killed and served at 

 dainty repast; while at the restaurants reed, 

 or rice, birds sell for 50 cents a skewer. 

 When in the early autumn one sees on the 

 menu card, "Cronstades of reed birds," let 

 him remember that he is eating the joy- 

 ous songster who fills our hearts with the 

 uplift of his thankful spirit in the early 

 days of summer. 



Our little friend does not linger long at 

 the plantation, for he has appointments 

 with flocks of his kind from all parts of the 

 United States to meet in Florida. It seems 

 as if it were an autumnal convention of the 

 bird with many names. When all affairs of 

 this branch of the bird kingdom are settled, 

 the travelers start for their winter home, the 



majority going first to Jamaica. There na- 

 ture has prepared a dainty repast for them 

 in the seeds of the guinea grass. On this 

 diet they grow so plump that epicures like 

 them for the table, and they are known 

 there as butter birds. If they go to Cuba, 

 they are called Chamber gos. The journey 

 is not yet over, for they have no intention 

 of wintering in the West Indies, because 

 their ancestors never did so, hence they 

 plume themselves for the long flight of 400 

 miles across the Caribbean sea to Venezu- 

 ela. From there they hasten on to South- 

 western Brazil, where they spend Christ- 

 mas, hang up their stockings, and order 

 their new spring suits of black, white and 

 buff. The bobolink is one of the few birds 

 that moult completely twice a year. 



It seems as if they give themselves no 

 time for rest, for they are back again in 

 Florida quite early, where they are called 

 May birds, and with a strange foreknowl- 

 edge, they arrive at the rice plantations 

 just in time to revel in the young, green 

 shoots of the rice plant, which are peep- 

 ing above ground. The planters are obliged 

 to order out their minders to save their 

 crops from utter destruction. By the middle 

 of May our own little bobolink is wooing 

 his mate in his Northern home, and plan- 

 ning his housekeeping in perhaps the same 

 spot where we first made his acquaintance. 



What a traveler he has been ! He holds 

 steam and electric cars in contempt. Un- 

 hampered by tickets or trunks, he has 

 passed over hills and valleys, rivers and 

 streams, cities and plains, a distance of 

 4,600 miles, to the South, and when the 

 homing instinct asserts itself, he returns as 

 fresh and gay as when he caroled his 

 cheery songs to us a year ago. 



Caroline F. Little, Brooklyn, N. Y. 



A CAPTIVE CONDOR. 

 Two newspaper items recount interfer- 

 ence with trolley and railway traffic in the 

 United States by birds. In the first case 

 a blue heron short circuits the city wires 

 in Utica, N. Y., and in the second an owl 

 gets mixed up with a switch point on the 

 Mobile & Ohio railway. Nothing so small 

 as a mere handful of feathers could hold 

 up a train on the Guayaquil & Quito rail- 

 way. When the regular passenger train on 

 the mountain division pulled into Alausi 

 the other day, somewhat late, the train 

 crew proudly displayed a condor, securely 

 tied, and explained the delay by telling 

 how this bird was found in a railway cut 

 some miles down the line, occupying the 

 space reserved for running trains, and un- 

 able or unwilling to leave; so the train 

 hands roped it and brought it to the termi- 

 nal station, where it now occupies a fore- 

 most place in the growing collection of 

 Ecuadorian fauna at headquarters' camp. 



