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A single male red-wing, as we have seen, may assume the cares of a harem of three, four, or five females, each of which rears her brown-streaked offspring in her own particular nest, while the valiant guardian keeps faithful watch over his small colony among the reeds and cat-tails. But little thought or care does mother cowbird waste upon her offspring.
The nest is a rude, strong affair of sticks and coarse grass-stalks lined with finer grass, and looks very bulky and rough beside the neat structure of the red-wing; which illustrates how much better a result can be produced by an artistic use of the same material.
But, perhaps, there is only one creed by which you can be both at once the creed of the growing grass, and the blue sky and the running river, the creed of the dog-wood and the skunk-cabbage, the creed of the red-wing and the blue heron the creed of the great god Pan.
In nesting time the red-wing is indeed a citizen of the lowland. His voice is as distinctive of the marsh as is the croak of the frog, and from a distance it is one of the first sounds to greet the ear. How beautiful is his clear whistle with its liquid break! Indeed one may say that he is the most conspicuous singer of the marshlands.
I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.
We marked with wonder the intense interest manifested hour by hour by all classes in the sermons, addresses, and especially in the discussion: "How shall we build up the church?" Elder David Grey Cloud said, "We must care for the church if we would make it effective. We must care for all we gather into the church." The Rev. James Red-Wing added, "The work of the church is heavy.
Down by the flats, where the tiny creek widened to a miniature swamp and emptied its placid waters into the main stream, the red-wing blackbirds sounded their strange cry among the cat-tails and the bull-rushes; the frogs croaked in ceaseless and reverberant chorus; the catfish were ever hungry after dark, and the night was broken by the glare of torches along the little bridge or in a group of boats where fisher-lads kept close watch upon their corks.
Bird regions, too, showed a definite demarcation. In the orchards and open fields of the town were the home-loving birds, bluebirds, robins, song and other sparrows, swallows, and in the marshes the red-wing blackbirds. Not one of these did I see after leaving the open spaces behind.
The performance of the chat was exceedingly droll; first a whistle, clear as an oriole note, followed by chacks that would deceive a red-wing himself, and then, oddest of all, the laugh of a feeble old man, a weak sort of "yah! yah! yah!" If I had not seen him in the act, I could not have believed the sound came from a bird's throat.
Its habits are essentially those of the red-wing. We have another set of blackbirds of greater size, commonly known as "crow" blackbirds, but which in the books are called grakles. There are several species, but none are greatly different from that too-common pest of our cornfields,
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