Nathaniel Hawthorne writes in his journal:
But I must mention the great companies of blackbirds—more than the famous “four-and twenty,” who were baked in a pie—that congregate in the tops of contiguous trees, and vociferate with all the clamor of a turbulent political meeting. Politics must certainly be the occasion of such a tumultuous debate; but still there is a melody in each individual utterance, and a harmony in the general effect. Mr. Thoreau tells me that these noisy assemblages consist of three different species of black-birds—one of them the crow-blackbird—but I forget the other two.
(The American Notebooks, 182)
