The Press., 1905-11-15
THE TIRED COVERED
DOWNRIGHT LAZY IS THIS BLACK
 HOBO OF vHE oRIoLE TRIBE.

It Builds No Nests of 1t@ OWnS but Lays Its Eggs In the Nests of Other
 Birds and Never Troubles Itself
 About Rearing Its Young.
 The cowbird was born so tired that if he could compel any other bird to gather his food for him he would do so, but he cannot, so he scratches about all day among the herds of cattle and sheep and goes to ro0st at night in great bands of hundreds of his rela- | tives, always selecting a bushy tree, such as a cypress, for a nights perch. All up and down the Mississippi river valley is the common summer home of these birds, for only in the depth of winter do they retreat to the warmer mesas of Mexico, whither most of the other birds have preceded them. In the spring following such a winter they are the first to return, filling all the new year air with their chatter and lining the barnyard trees.
 You must not think that the glossy black and brown birds so plentiful | around southern California barnyards during the winter months are cow birds, for they are not. They are call ed "grackles" and seem to be more like crows than blackbirds. You can find their nests, big, bulky affairs, in the | orange and cypress trees of almost any of your ranch homes. There are many, many members to the blackbird family, the sweet voiced meadow larks and the gorgeous golden orioles as well as the more sober colored blackbirds and grackles, and of all these but one forces the matching of her eggs and the feeding of her young on to another bird mother.
 In England the cuckoo has this same habit, but the American cuckoo builds her nest and sits on her eggs as nicely as any robin or dove could do. Some times our road runner so far forgets herself as to lay her eggs in the nest of quail or a meadow lark, but not often, but when she does the bird upon whom Mrs. Road Runner tries to i'm pose generally breaks the strange egg or else goes away and leaves the nest ] alone. Then the field mice and the wood rats have a feast, to which some times the road runner comes herself, for she is very fond of eggs as long as they are not her own.
 But the cowbird never makes any such poor job as that. She always se- lects the nest of some smaller bird-in regions where warblers are plentiful the home of one of these little singers is most frequently chosen-and there as many eggs as she thinks the owner of the nest will submit to are laid. Sometimes the warbler goes right on incubating the intruder, but now and then the two old birds get together and dump the egg out on the ground. Nests have been found in which the warblers put mud floor over the first | nest and built another one on top of 1t, | leaving their own eggs to spoil because they knew no other way to rid them selves of the cowbird. If the cowbird comes back by the repaired nest she will put another egg in 1t, and gener- ally this egg is matched and raised by the foster pair on whom 1t has been forced
 It requires about ten or eleven days for the young cowbird to break the
 
 size are two or three days longer, and | thus he has a good start on the other nestlings in point of growth. When matched the cowbird is larger than the sparrow or the warbler and conse- quently gradually crowds them into the background, taking all the food that should belong to them. AS they grow weaker from this he grows stron- ger, and it is not long until he tips them out of the nest and is sole mas ter of the two old birds, who work ceaselessly to satisfy his awful appe. tite. In q very few days he gets too large for the little nest and goes out into the branches, where the old birds still continue to feed him in a way they never do their own young after they have left the nest. In Mexico and South America there is cowbird that sometimes builds a nest of her own and sits upon and hatches her own eggs, but no such thing ever hap pens among the black hoboes of the oriole family found farther north. How many eggs a cowbird lays no one knows, but as many as seven have been found 1n one nest or tue oven bird, kind of thrush found in the eastern states. Usually, however, only one egg is laid in each nest, es- pecially If the birds to whom the nest belongs are small and the nest too little to hold more than one of the cow birds young in comfort. The parent cowbird never disturbs the eggs of any of the birds in whose nests she leaves her own, knowing full well that if she did so the nest builder would in all probability desert her home or throw the strange egg out. Oftentimes more than one cowbird lays in the same nest, and, as no two eggs of these birds are ever exactly alike in color you may be sure that no cowbiro knows her own egg half minute aft CT she has laid it.-Los Angeles Times