A reader asked me recently about ground-nesting birds. Here is the story of one such bird, the bobolink. Bobolinks (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) breed in open grasslands and prairies. When European settlers arrived in North America, they cleared forests for hayfields, pastures and farms. Bobolinks, native to the Americas, thrived in hayfields, which were plentiful even near cities because people relied on hay-eating horses for transportation. To English settlers, the birds’ spring song sounded like bob-o-link or bob-o-lincoln, hence their onomatopoeic name. Bobolinks became so common that dozens of 18th- and 19th-century writers and poets, including William Cullen Bryant, immortalized these birds.
Robert of Lincoln is gaily drost,
Wearing a bright black wedding coat;
White are his shoulders and white his crest,
Hear him call in his merry note:
Bob-o’-link, bob-o’-link,
Spink, spank, spink;
Look, what a nice new coat is mine,
Sure there was never a bird so fine.
Chee, chee, chee.
Bobolinks make one of the longest migrations of any bird in the western hemisphere, traveling approximately 6,000 miles to the grasslands of southern Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. When the southern hemisphere summer ends, they return to the northern hemisphere, where they experience spring and summer again. While they live through two springs and two summers per year, bobolinks lay eggs and raise chicks only in the northern hemisphere.
When it is time to migrate south from the United States and Canada, West Coast bobolinks first fly to the east, before making their way south.
A bird of many names
They’ve developed regional names. Here in the Northeast, people called them reed birds because they gathered in tidal marshes in the late summer to feed on the seeds of reeds and grass, fattening up for their long migration south. Classy restaurants served reed birds whole and basted on buttered toast. One bird (eaten whole including bones) was “not more than a single mouthful for a healthy feeder …. A dozen is just about an ordinary meal.”
In the South, people called migrating bobolinks rice birds, because huge flocks descended on rice fields in Georgia and South Carolina. Gunners killed hundreds of thousands of these birds: A South Carolina game warden reported over 720,000 were killed in 1912 alone. The ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush was visiting the rice fields that year and noted the rice had mostly been harvested, so the birds were killed “for the twenty-five cents a dozen received by the shooters.” Merchants shipped the dead birds to market to become gourmet food in high-end restaurants.
Plenty of birds survived to continue their migration, converging in Florida, flying to Cuba and then to Jamaica, where “the now overfat bobolink is called the butter-bird and is shot in large numbers for food.” And thence to South America.
By the late 1800s, though, hunting and urbanization had taken its toll. According to William Brewster in “Birds of the Cambridge Region of Massachusetts:”
In the days of my youth Bobolinks nested every season in a grassy enclosure just behind our house, and their tinkling music might be heard almost everywhere in the fields and meadows a little further to the westward, especially in those bordering on Vassall Lane …. We saw them last in our own grounds about 1873, and they had disappeared from the entire region lying to the south and east of Fresh Pond before 1885.
Even where farms remained, technology and patterns also changed, threatening bobolink nesting and raising of chicks in hayfields. The most nutritious and valuable hay for livestock is green hay cut early in the season when bobolinks are still nesting, and as technology shifted from mowing by hand to shearing with machines it further reduced habitats for bobolinks.
Although reed birds are now protected in the United States and are no longer a delicacy served in restaurants, they still face habitat destruction and mowing machines. So what to do? In Massachusetts, the Bobolink Project pays farmers to modify their mowing schedules so that bobolinks can raise their young before fields are mowed. Still, between 1966 and 2023 the bobolink population has declined 63 percent, mostly due to human activities. It may take changes in our behavior to help the bobolink population thrive once again.
A stronger
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