We have another set of blackbirds of greater size, commonly known as "crow" blackbirds, but which in the books are called grakles. There are several species, but none are greatly different from that too-common pest of our cornfields,
THE PURPLE GRAKLE.
The real home of the grakles is along the edges of the swamps—not among the reeds where the red-wing and bobolink sit and swing, but rather in the bushes and trees skirting the muddy shores. They build their nests in a variety of positions, but usually a convenient fork in an alder-bush is chosen, twenty or thirty pairs often nesting within a radius of a hundred feet. The nest is a rude, strong affair of sticks and coarse grass-stalks lined with finer grass, and looks very bulky and rough beside the neat structure of the red-wing; which illustrates how much better a result can be produced by an artistic use of the same material. In the case of both these birds, however, the female does not wear the jetty, iridescent coat which adorns the head of the family and reflects the sunlight in a thousand prismatic tints, but hides herself and the home she cares for by affecting a dull, brown-black, streaked suit, assimilating her closely with the surrounding objects. This protective coloration of plumage is possessed by the females of many species of birds, which would be very conspicuous, and of course greatly liable to danger while incubating their eggs, if they wore the bright tints of the males. The tanager and indigo-bird afford prominent examples. Sometimes the crow blackbirds make their homes at a distance from the water, and occasionally they choose odd places, such as the tops of tall pine trees, the spires of churches, martin-boxes in gardens and holes in trees. The latter situation is one which the bronzed blackbird of the Mississippi Valley (var. Æneus) especially makes use of.
Grakles' eggs are among the first on every boy's string, and until he gains experience the young collector supposes he has almost as many different species represented as he has specimens, so much do they differ, even in the same nestful, in respect to color, shape and size. Their length averages about 1.25 by .90 of an inch, but some are long, slender and pointed, while others are round, fat, and blunt at both ends. The ground color may be any shade of dirty white, light blue, greenish or olive brown; the markings consist of sharply-defined spots and confused blotches, scratches and straggling lines of obscure colors, from blue-black to lilac and rusty brown—sometimes scantily and prettily marbled upon the surface of the egg, and sometimes painted on so thick as to wholly conceal the ground color.
The crow blackbirds are in the advance-guard of the returning hosts of spring, making their appearance in small scattering flocks, and announcing their presence by loud smacks frequently repeated. They obtain most of their food from the ground, and walk about with great liveliness, scratching up the leaves, turning over chips and poking about the pastures for insects and seeds softened by the spring rains. Their destruction of insects—especially during May, when their young are in the nest—is enormous; yet their forays upon the cornfields, I fear, overbalance the good done the farmer by putting an end to grubs noxious to his crops.
"The depredations committed by these birds are almost wholly on Indian corn at different stages. As soon as its blades appear above the ground after it has been planted, the grakles descend upon the fields, pull up the tender plant and devour the seeds, scattering the green blades around. It is of little use to attempt to drive them away with a gun: they only fly from one part of the field to another. And again, as soon as the tender corn has formed, these flocks, now replenished by the growing of the year, once more swarm in the cornfields, tear off the husks and devour the tender grains. Wilson has seen fields of corn in which more than half the corn was thus ruined.
"These birds winter in immense numbers in the lower parts of Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, sometimes forming one congregated multitude of several hundred thousand. On one occasion Wilson met, on the banks of the Roanoke, on the 20th of January, one of these prodigious armies of crow blackbirds. They arose, he states, from the surrounding fields with a noise like thunder, and descending on the length of the road before him, they covered it and the fences completely with black: when they again rose, and after a few evolutions descended on the skirts of the high-timbered woods, they produced a most singular and striking effect. Whole trees, for a considerable extent, from the top to the lowest branches, seemed as if hung with mourning. Their notes and screaming, he adds, seemed all the while like the distant sounds of a great cataract, but in a musical cadence."
Ernest Ingersoll.