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Updated: May 31, 2025
"Never mind, Comrades," interrupted Shag. "We are glad of your company, little Cow-Bird are we not, A'tim?" "Yes," answered the Dog-Wolf, licking his chops, and looking treacherously from the corner of his slit eyes at the Bird. "Where are you going, Great Bull?" asked the Cow-Bird, spreading his deep-brown wings mockingly, as though he would fly down on the Dog-Wolf's head. "To the Northland."
This was the common purple cow-bird, one of the Troupial family, exclusively American, but supposed to have affinities with the starlings of the Old World. The male is of a uniform deep purple-black, the female a drab or mouse-colour.
In June, when so many an ecstatic love-song among the birds has modulated from accents of ardent love to those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud," the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the bird homes which are blasted in her "annual visit?"
In this connection it is interesting to note certain developments in bird life upon the lines of which evolution might work with revolutionary effect. Most of our birds are helpless and generally resigned victims to the cow-bird, but there are indications of occasional effective protest among them.
The last one I saw was a pendent from the end of a low branch of a maple, that nearly grazed the clapboards of an unused hay-barn in a remote backwoods clearing. I peeped through a crack and saw the old birds feed the nearly fledged young within a few inches of my face. And yet the cow-bird finds this nest and drops her parasitical egg in it.
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