Rensselaer Republican, Volume 22, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 January 1890 — Reed Bird and Mocking bird. [ARTICLE]

Reed Bird and Mocking bird.

The reed bird of the Deleware and : the rivers and regions south of that - stream is the rollicking bobolink uJ our New England fields. Here is his true home, even if his residence in j it is not so long as it is in the south. Here he is adorned with a gray piebalb coat, instead of the somber suit of black in which he appears wh en in more southern latitudes, and here he nests and sings and rears his brood. Here in the sunny green fields of New : England, through all the charming May and for some way into June, he pours out the most peculiar, the most over buboling, frolicsome, swaggering rollicking and tipsy of all bird music. He is not so abundant here as he was in the days before he was shot by the thousand by sportsmen as the reed bird of the lower Susquehanna and the lower Delaware, and before a set of worthless men and boys here in southern New England acquired, through somebody’s ingenuity, a trap which catches him. He was here in rather greater force last M ty than usual of late years, the tendency being not to increase, i but to diminish. Connecticut fields are i not so filled as they were fifty years ago : with his swaggering and most peculiar tinkling song. It may be said of him and the mocking bird that if both or either had been known to Europe for the last two thousand years, and particularly to Italy, Greece and England, there would have baen a greater fame for either than the nightingale now has. But the pothunters for the Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York markets are destroying the bobolink as the reed bird, and the negro with his shot gun blazing away at the mocking bird (he can’t shoot him except when the bird is at rest) is fast completing what the nest robbing youngnegroes Who supply northern buyer had long ago begun—the destruction of the superb mocking bird, the finest songster as well as the most spirited and intelligent of our American birds. —Hartford Times.