224 
PURPLE GRAKLE. 
wards the middle of that month they begin to sheer off towards 
the south. The lowet parts of Virginia, North and South Car- 
olina, 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 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 de- 
scended on the skirts of the high timbered woods, at that time 
destitute of leaves, they produced a most singular and striking 
effect; the whole trees for a considerable extent, from the top 
to the lowest branches, seeming as if hung in mourning; their 
notes and screaming the meanwhile resembling the distant sound 
of a great cataract, but in more musical cadence, swelling and 
dying away on the ear according to the fluctuation of the breeze- 
In Kentucky, and all along the Mississippi, from its junction 
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 ; though were the same means used, as with pigeons, to 
take them in clap-nets, multitudes of them might thus be de- 
stroyed; and the products of them in market, in some measure, 
indemnify him for their depredations. But they are most nu- 
merous and most destructive at a time when the various har- 
vests 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 winter quarters, sometimes ear- 
ly in March, to renew the like scenes over again. As some 
