PURPLE GRAKLE. 



335 



pull up and regale themselves on the seed, scattering the green 

 blades around. While thus eagerly employed, the vengeance 

 of the gun sometimes overtakes them ; but these disasters are 

 soon forgotten, and those 



who live to get away, 



Eeturn to steal another day. 



About the beginning of August, when the young ears are in 

 their milky state, they are attacked with redoubled eagerness 

 by the grakles and redwings, in formidable and combined 

 bodies. They descend like a blackening, sweeping tempest 

 on the corn, dig off the external covering of twelve or fifteen 

 coats of leaves as dexterously as if done by the hand of man, 

 and having laid bare the ear, leave little behind to the farmer 

 but the cobs and shrivelled skins that contained their favourite 

 fare. I have seen fields of corn of many acres where more 

 than one-half was thus ruined. Indeed, the farmers in the 

 immediate vicinity of the rivers Delaware and Schuylkill 

 generally allow one-fourth of this crop to the blackbirds, 

 among whom our grakle comes in for his full share. During 

 these depredations, the gun is making great havoc among 

 their numbers, which has no other effect on the survivors than 

 to send them to another field, or to another part of the same 

 field. This system of plunder and retaliation continues until 

 November, when, towards the middle of that month, they 

 begin to sheer off towards the south. The lower parts of 

 Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, are the 

 winter residences of these flocks. Here numerous bodies, 

 collecting together from all quarters of the interior and 

 northern districts, and darkening the air with their numbers, 

 sometimes form one congregated multitude of many hundred 

 thousands. A few miles from the banks of the Roanoke, on 

 the 20th of January, I met with one of those prodigious armies 

 of grakles. They rose from the surrounding fields with a 

 noise like thunder, and, descending on the length of road 

 before me, covered it and the fences completely with black ; 



