Educate Yourself About the Bobolink and Its Habitat
Bobolink
The Bobolink has a yellow nape, white rump and scapulars, the wings are pointed, and its body is solid black below and mostly white above. Its length is 6-8in (15-20cm)
Its wingspan is 12in (30cm) Its voice is ecstatic song, starts with low, reedy notes, rollicking upward while in flight and descending. Their eggs are pale grey or buff-colored with brown blotches, and have 1 clutch of 5-6 eggs. The female incubates 10-13 days and the fledging time is around 10-14 days. Both male and female feed their young.The female resembles a large sparrow, with a striped crown, and is buff-colored below.
You can usually hear this bird from up above, over grassy fields, and its cheerful song is the reason for its name. The song is also how the male attract females (more then one), also, female Bobolinks looks nothing like the male, instead they resemble large sparrows.
The female builds the nest on the ground, in slight depressions, and uses coarse grass for the outside and finer grass as the lining. Usually the Bobolinks nests close to several other nests, to create loose colonies that persist in the same fields for years.
During the nesting season their diet includes beetles, caterpillars, wasps, grasshoppers, mixed in with seeds and panic grass. During the fall migration the switch to mostly seeds and grass. Bobolinks can travel as far as 5.000 miles from their North American nesting habitat, to southern Brazil and northern Argentina; witch makes them have the longest migration, of any other members of the blackbird family.
Enormous amounts of Bobolinks where killed in the early twentieth century, when they migrated down through south Carolina rice fields, to protect crops. During those years they were called the “rice birds”, but now Bobolinks are protected from hunting. Unfortunately, the population is still declining, because of fever nesting grounds and pesticides.
If you like to attract Bobolinks to your backyard or friendly bird feeding garden, you must have at least a property with large fields, the size of 5 acres (2.2 hectares) or more. Planting insect attracting trees, plants and grass will definitely help, and providing nesting opportunities, will definitely help the declining Bobolink population.
