Meadow Lark
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Meadow Lark. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a member of the oriole family. It is rather unfortunate that this fine bird should be called a lark, as it is much more nearly related to the bobolink and the blackbird. It is a dignified, well behaved, brown bird, with a fine yellow throat and breast marked with a black crescent. Its favorite perch is the top of a fence post. Neither timid nor familiar, it nests on the ground, generally overarching its home with grasses in the shelter of a clod or tuft of some sort. Eggs, four to six, white, speckled with cinnamon. The meadow lark makes a harmless living on insects and seeds. Sportsmen are frequently deceived for an instant when their dogs, pointing for chickens and quail, flush a meadow lark. In flight it shows a white outer feather on each side of the tail. A western species, a trifle smaller than the preceding, breeds from the upper Mississippi Valley westward to British Columbia . It has a fine reputation as a songster. Meadow lark
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a beautiful American species of lark, Orlanda Magna, found in eastern United States to the high central plains. It is about 11 inches long, and the tail 5 inches. The body is thick and stout, the legs large; the bill is nearly straight, and three times as long as high; inner lateral toe longer than the outer; feathers of head stiffened, the shafts above extended into a black bristle. The upper parts are brown, marked with brownish-white, and the exposed portions of the wings and tail with transverse dark-brown bars; the under parts yellow, with a black pectoral crescent.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's 1910 note that it is "rather unfortunate that this fine bird should be called a lark" has been fully vindicated: meadowlarks sit in the New World blackbird family, Icteridae, alongside the bobolink and orioles, while Collier's 1921 "beautiful American species of lark, Orlanda Magna," is a garbled rendering of the eastern meadowlark's real name, Sturnella magna. The western bird Aiton's mentions is now recognized as a full species, Sturnella neglecta, and in 2022 the birds of the southwestern grasslands were split off again as the Chihuahuan meadowlark. The biggest change is one of abundance: the fencepost bird both writers treated as commonplace has lost roughly three-quarters of its North American population since 1970 as pasture and hayfield habitat disappeared, and the eastern meadowlark is now treated as a species of conservation concern.
Written for this edition, 2026.