The laying-season is said to be at its height during the latter part of April. He found in no instance more than six eggs in a nest, nor less than three. He thinks that they have two, and perhaps three, broods in a season, as he found it not uncommon to meet with newly fledged birds in September.
These birds are eminently gregarious at all seasons of the year, and at certain seasons assemble in large flocks. They are omnivorous, eating both insects and grain, and are alternately benefactors and plunderers of the
planters. In the early season they seek their food among the large salt marshes of the seaboard, and along the muddy banks of creeks and rivers. They do great damage to the rice plantations, both when the grain is in the soft state and afterwards when the ripened grain is stacked. They also feed very largely upon the small crabs called fiddlers, so common in all the mud flats, earthworms, various insects, shrimps, and other aquatic forms of the like character.
A few of these birds are resident throughout the year, though the greater part retire farther south during a portion of the winter. They return in February, in full plumage, when they mate. They resort, by pairs and in companies, to certain favorite breeding-places, where they begin to construct their nests. They do not, however, even in Florida, begin to breed before April. They build a large and clumsy nest, made of very coarse and miscellaneous materials, chiefly sticks and fragments of dry weeds, sedges, and strips of bark, lined with finer stems, fibrous roots, and grasses, and have from three to five eggs.
It is a very singular but well-established characteristic of this species, that no sooner is their nest completed and incubation commenced than the male birds all desert their mates, and, joining one another in flocks, keep apart from the females, feeding by themselves, until they are joined by the young birds and their mothers in the fall.
These facts and this trait of character in this species have been fully confirmed by the observations of Dr. Bachman of Charleston. In 1832 he visited a breeding-locality of these birds. On a single Smilax bush he found more than thirty nests of the Grakles, from three to five feet apart, some of them not more than fifteen inches above the water, and only females were seen about the nests, no males making their appearance. Dr. Bachman also visited colonies of these nests placed upon live-oak trees thirty or forty feet from the ground, and carefully watched the manners of the old birds, but has never found any males in the vicinity of their nests after the eggs had been laid. They always keep at a distance, feeding in flocks in the marshes, leaving the females to take charge of their nests and young. They have but one brood in a season.
As these birds fly, in loose flocks, they continually utter a peculiar cry, which Mr. Audubon states resembles or may be represented by kirrick, crick, crick. Their usual notes are harsh, resembling loud, shrill whistles, and are frequently accompanied with their ordinary cry of crick-crick-cree. In the love-season these notes are said to be more pleasing, and are changed into sounds which Audubon states resemble tirit, tirit, titiri-titiri-titirēē, rising from low to high with great regularity and emphasis. The cry of the young bird, when just able to fly, he compares to the whistling cry of some kind of frogs.
The males are charged by Mr. Audubon with attacking birds of other species, driving them from their nests and sucking their eggs.
Dr. Bryant, who found this species the most common bird in the neighborhood of Lake Monroe, adds that it could be seen at all times running along the edge of the water, almost in the manner of a Sandpiper. They were breeding by hundreds in the reeds near the inlet to the lake. On the 6th of April some of the birds had not commenced laying, though the majority had hatched, and the young of others were almost fledged.
The eggs of this species measure 1.25 inches in length by .92 in breadth. Their ground-color is usually a brownish-drab, in some tinged with olive, in others with green. Over this are distributed various markings, in lines, zigzags, and irregular blotches of brown and black.