12 
TWENTY-SIX COMMON BIRDS. 
able song. The female is very inconspicuously dressed in brown 
and yellowish, and the males also acquire these colors by the end 
of August, so that the great flocks which congregate in the south¬ 
ern reed and rice fields are made up solely of silent, plain-colored 
marauders. The migration is accomplished at night, and the mellow 
chink which is the bird’s call note is clearly distinguished in the 
silence of the night. The winter is spent in southern and central 
America. The Bobolink is classed with the Blackbird and Oriole, 
The Bobolink’s nest is placed in the grass, and consists merely of a 
bedding of withered grass, on which are laid from four to six gray¬ 
ish or brownish-white eggs, marked with dull dark brown. Its 
food in summer consists of spiders, crickets and other insects, but 
as soon as the seeds of the wild oats and the larger grasses ripen, 
the Bobolinks subsist on them. This diet and the rice further south 
makes them very fat. Thousands of them are now shot and sold 
in the markets, to those only, let us hope, who have never known 
the Bobolink in June. It would be a crime to kill a Bobolink in 
full song, in New England. In a southern rice field it is an un¬ 
fortunate necessity. If the bird is protected in the breeding season, 
it will probably hold its own, notwithstanding the annual attacks 
on the fall migrants. 
RED-WINGED BLACKBIRD. 15. 
[AGELvEUS piigeniceus.] 
This Starling, like many of its family, spends the greater part 
of the year in large flocks, which in former times were supposed 
to inflict great damage on crops and were persecuted accordingly. 
The defenders of the bird have, however, demonstrated that the 
number of noxious insects which the bird destroys more than offsets 
the damage it does. In New England, moreover, its life is chiefly 
passed in swamps, and along the margins of streams, and its 
food here consists almost entirely of insects. The males arrive 
