lmost 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