Bobolink

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

a familiar bird related to the oriole, meadowlark, and blackbird. The bobolink breeds from Montana to Nova Scotia and southward to the Ohio Valley. The female has modest olive plumage streaked with black. Yellowish underneath. In the mating season the male is finely appareled in black, buff, white, and yellow. As the season draws to a close he puts off his gay feathers and dons an olive traveling suit resembling that of the female and the young. In the grain-growing states the bobolink families gather into large flocks at the harvest season, and are called yellow birds locally. After feeding on the ripening grain in the field and shock, they migrate and reappear in the rice swamps of the South, where they are known as rice birds and reed birds, and are hunted for the table. Here they are charged with eating $2,000,000 worth of rice yearly. Still later they resume their southward migration, chiefly by way of Florida, it is said, and pass the winter south of the Amazon. The male bobolink precedes the female a few days in the spring flight to northward, coming again by way of Florida in large flocks. During the southern sojourn the olive tips of his feathers have worn off, and he reaches our shore clad in spring finery. The bobolink's summer life cannot be better described than by the poet Bryant in Robert of Lincoln, beginning, Merrily singing on brier and weed Near to the nest of his little dame. Lowell, however, is the poet of the bobolink. We cannot omit two passages, the first from The Biglow Papers, and the second from An Indian-Summer Reverie: 'Nuff sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year, Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here; Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings, Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings, Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair, Runs down, a brook o' laughter, through the air. Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the bobolink, Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops Just ere he sweeps o'er rapture's tremulous brink, And 'twixt the winrows most demurely drops, A decorous bird of business, who provides For his brown mate and fledglings six besides, And looks from right to left, a farmer mid his crops. See Birds