Blackbird
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Blackbird. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a well known member of a large bird family. It is related to the oriole, bobolink, and meadow-lark. The red-winged blackbird with scarlet shoulders and his rusty, buffy, modest wife build nests in the sedges, reeds, and rushes a foot or two above the water throughout the swamps of Eastern North America from the Gulf to Manitoba. Eggs, three to five, pale blue, streaked or spotted with dark purple. The spring concert of newly arrived blackbirds rivals that of the bullfrog. The Kong Ki reee, conqueree conqueree, of a male balancing dexterously midway up an old reed or sitting on a willow is a cheerful trill of rich music. "The redwing flutes his O Ka lee," says Emerson. The assaults of the blackbird on green corn, and a propensity not unlike that of the snipe to drill a hole at the base of sprouting corn for the sake of the seed, have not endeared him to the farmer. These birds gather in large flocks prior to their migration southward for the winter. The yellow-headed blackbird nests in extensive bodies of reeds from Illinois to Manitoba and westward. The rusty blackbird ranges farther north. The purple grackle, or crow blackbird , breeds in the Mississippi Valley and eastward. The blackbirds of Europe and Africa do not belong to the same family as ours. They are thrushes. The "wild whistling blackbird," named by Burns in his sorrow, belongs to a British family of thrushes. See Cow-Bird ; Bird Red-winged blackbird
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a well-known British names sometimes given to it are the ring ousel, the merle, the garden ousel, or simply the ousel . A book name is also the black thrush. The male is black, with above, lighter beneath, the throat and the bill yellow; the female is deep brown foreneck pale brown with darker streaks; the young , dusky brown above with dull yellowish streaks, while beneath they have dusky spots. varieties, one of them white. The black- There are several bird is a permanent resident in England. It feeds in winter on snails, and also on BLACKBOY earthworms and berries. It pairs in February or March. Its nest is bulky, and is composed externally of stalks of grasses, twigs, etc. It lays four (generally five) eggs. They are pale bluish . There is green with darker markings no bird in the United States precisely similar to the European bird here described. There are two American species; the red winged blackbird (argelaius phœniceus) and the crow blackbird (quisculus versicolor).
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both descriptions still hold, and Aiton's 1910 insistence that "the blackbirds of Europe and Africa do not belong to the same family as ours" has been vindicated: the European blackbird is a true thrush, Turdus merula, while the red-winged, yellow-headed, rusty and crow blackbirds belong to the New World family Icteridae with the orioles, bobolink and meadowlarks, as Aiton's says. Names have tidied up rather than changed — the purple grackle or crow blackbird is now the common grackle, Quiscalus quiscula, rather than Collier's "quisculus versicolor." The sharpest new fact is a loss: the rusty blackbird, mentioned only in passing in 1910 as ranging farther north, has suffered one of the steepest declines of any North American songbird since the mid-twentieth century and is now treated as a species of conservation concern, even as the red-winged blackbird remains among the continent's most abundant birds. The European blackbird, a "permanent resident in England" in 1921, has also been established as an introduced and often invasive bird in Australia and New Zealand.
Written for this edition, 2026.