46 



PURPLE GRAKLE. 



The lower parts of Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Geor- 

 gia, are the winter residences of these flocks. Here numerous bo- 

 dies, collecting together from all quarters of the interior and nor- 

 thern districts, and darkening the air with their numbers, some- 

 times form one congregated multitude of many hundred thousands. 

 A few miles from the banks of the Roanoke, on the twentieth 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, and when they again rose, and 

 after a few evolutions descended on the skirts of the high timbered 

 woods, at that time destitute of leaves, they produced a most sin- 

 gular and striking effect ; the whole trees for a considerable extent, 

 from the top to the lowest branches, seeming as if hung in mourn- 

 ing; their notes and screaming the meanwhile resembling the dis- 

 tant sound of a great cataract, but in more musical cadence, swell- 

 ing and dying away on the ear, according to the fluctuation of the 

 breeze. In Kentucky, and all along the Mississippi, from its junc- 

 ture with the Ohio to the Balize, I found numbers of these birds, 

 so that the Purple Grakle may be considered as a very general in- 

 habitant of the territory of the United States. 



Every industrious farmer complains of the mischief commit- 

 ted on his corn by the Crow Blackbirds, as they are usually called ; 

 tho, were the same means used, as with pigeons, to take them in 

 clap nets, multitudes of them might thus be destroyed; and the 

 products of them in market, in some measure, indemnify him for 

 their depredations. But they are most numerous and most de- 

 structive at a time when the various harvests of the husbandman 

 demand all his attention, and all his hands to cut, cure, and take 

 in ; and so they escape with a few sweeps made among them by 

 some of the younger boys with the gun; and by the gunners from 

 the neighbouring towns and villages ; and return from their win- 

 ter quarters, sometimes early in March, to renew the like scenes 



