SKYLARK, a European lark (Aland° ar vensis), one of the most popular European cage birds from the variety and power, rather than the quality, of its song, and the ease with which its health is preserved in captivity. It inhabits all of Europe, many migrating south in winter. The adult male is about seven inches long; crown dark brown with paled edges, forming a crest, upper parts brown, each feather with a spot of darker hue; throat and upper part of breast grayish-brown, spotted with dark brown, abdomen yellowish-white, deepening into pale brown on the flanks, tail feathers various shades of brown. The female is a little smaller than the male.
The bird is famous wherever English is spoken and English poetry is read, for its flight song, begun in early spring, and continued all through the summer. When it first rises from the earth, its notes are feeble and interrupted; as it ascends, however, they gradually swell to their full tone, and long after the bird has reached a height where it is lost to the eye, it still continues to charm the ear with its melody.
It mounts perhaps more perpendicularly than any other bird, and by successive spring, and descends in an oblique direction, sal nting its rippling music.
The female forms her nest on the ground within some depression, which serves to hide and shelter it —often in grainfields. lays four or five dirty white eggs, bl6tched and spotted with brown; and she generally produces two broods in a year. These prolific birds live on seeds and insects; they are most abundant in the more open and highest cultivated situa tions abounding in grain. In winter they as semble in vast flocks, grow very fat, and are taken in great numbers for the table, especially in the Mediterranean region. Consult Boubote, of Great Britain' (1907).