While exploring the coast of Texas in the summer of 1837, John James Audubon noted that the Rice Bird would migrate in small groups during the night. Whereas in the fall, Rice Birds migrated south and would rise from their roosts during the day and form flocks “sufficient to cover several acres.” As the cultivation of rice expanded into one of the most important crops for the economy of South Carolina, the acres that Rice Birds especially favored were those planted in rice. Rice Birds received their common name not as a term of endearment but out of the maddening amount of rice they consumed.
Some rice growers assigned young slaves the task of scaring away the Rice Birds before they devoured the grains of rice waiting to be harvested. More typically rice growers resorted to gunfire. “One would think that every gun in the country has been put in requisition. Millions of these birds are destroyed, and yet millions remain, for after all the havoc that has been made among them in the Middle Districts, they follow the coast, and reach the rice plantations of the Carolinas in such astonishing numbers, that no one could conceive their flocks to have been already thinned.” The current common name for the Rice Bird is the Bobolink in reference to its bink or bwink flight call. The collapse of rice cultivation in North America and the loss of grassland habitat have drastically reduced the number of Bobolinks that once gathered in the “millions” to at best a few thousand.