teva ALU Us brOrNe Biv Le br iN 9 
Western Meadowlarks in Cook County 
By F. J. FREEMAN 
ABOUT EIGHT YEARS ago I had identified for me the song of the western 
meadowlark. I was calling on a man who lived on Wood Dale road just 
south of .Devon ave., and upon hearing the bird singing there, I asked him 
and he told me what it was. Since then I have heard and seen it many times 
along the Wood Dale road, the Arlington Heights road, and intermediate 
roads. 
During April of 1946 I made a survey of birds along the road as I drove 
from Itasca to Arlington Heights each morning. The road leads north out 
of Itasca; at the south end of the Elk Grove forest preserve (recently re- 
named William Busse forest preserve) the road swings east and then north 
up the eastern edge of the preserve. After leaving the preserve area the 
road continues north into Arlington Heights. Perhaps the most important 
fact I gleaned from this check was that in the first section of the road, about 
four miles up to the preserve, I heard on the average five western meadow- 
larks singing to four eastern. This section of the road runs through typical 
dairy farming country. 
The next section running along the preserve is also dairy farming chang- 
ing into truck farming country. Just a few eastern meadowlarks were 
heard in this area. Reason? Predators, perhaps, both furred and feathered, 
from the preserve and a lack of suitable habitat. However, Gordon Pearsall, 
in his report on Elk Grove in 1942, lists one nest of the western meadow- 
lark found in a wet meadow in the southern part of the preserve. The next 
section of the road, which runs through a mixture of peony farms, cultivated 
fields, and acre homesteads to the outskirts of Arlington Heights, yielded 
many eastern meadowlarks but no western ones. 
I have only one record indicating how much farther east, south, or north 
of the adjacent territory the range of the western meadowlark extends. I 
do have records of their singing southwest, west, and northwest up into 
the Barrington countryside. The lone record in any of the other directions 
is that two springs in a row I heard a western meadowlark singing near 
the southeastern corner of Prospect Heights, south of the intersection of 
MacDonald and Wheeling roads. This is eight or ten miles northeast of 
where I usually have heard them. 
According to my records the meadowlarks of both species start their 
singing in March. Sometimes one species is heard first and sometimes the 
other, sometimes early in the month and sometimes late. I have also heard 
meadowlarks with a song that was a combination of both so that you could 
not tell which kind it was. I wrote to A. A. Saunders about this singing, 
wondering if it indicated hybridization. From him I understood that hybri- 
dization would show up in the alarm call which, in the two species, is dis- 
tinctive and instinctive, whereas the song is acquired. I have yet to hear an 
indeterminate song followed by an identifying alarm call. Some day some- 
one may hear an indeterminate song and an indeterminate alarm call and 
find himself on the track of a hybrid “middle-western” meadowlark. 
