Wood thrush

“ He listens to the Wood Thrush, while he thinks of the course which he ought to pursue, and as the bird approaches to peep at him, and learn somewhat of his intentions, he raises his mind towards the Supreme Disposer of events. Seldom, indeed, have I heard the song of this Thrush, without feeling all that tranquillity of mind, to which the secluded situation in which it delights is so favourable. The thickest and darkest woods always appear to please it best. ”

“ The hermit thrush you will rarely see. But late some afternoon, when the sun is lifting along the trunks of the hardwood forest, if you are very lucky and very quiet, you will hear him far in the depth of the blackest swamps. Musically expressed, his song is very much like that of the wood thrush--three cadenced liquid notes, a quivering pause, then three more notes of another phrase, and so on. But the fineness of its quality makes of it an entirely different performance. If you symbolize the hermit thrush by the flute, you must call the wood thrush a chime of little tinkling bells. ”

“ The rich rufous colouring of the tail proclaims him a singer of singers—a hermit thrush. We must be on the watch these days for the beautiful wood thrush, the lesser spotted veery, the well named olive-back and the rarer gray-cheeked thrush. We may look in vain among the thrushes in our bird books for the golden-crowned and water thrush, for these walkers of the woods are thrushes only in appearance, and belong to the family of warblers. ”

“ There is no nest-builder that suffers more from crows and squirrels and other enemies than the wood thrush. It builds as openly and unsuspiciously as if it thought all the world as honest as itself. Its favorite place is the fork of a sapling, eight or ten feet from the ground, where it falls an easy prey to every nest-robber that comes prowling through the woods and groves. It is not a bird that skulks and hides, like the catbird, the brown thrasher, the chat, or the chewink, and its nest is not concealed with the same art as theirs. ”

“ Nature preserves her innocence like a beautiful child. I hear a wood thrush even now, long before sunrise, as in the heat of the day. And the pewee and the catbird and the vireo, red-eyed? I do not hear—or do not mind, perchance—the crickets now. Now whip-poor-wills commence to sing in earnest, considerably after the wood thrush. The wood thrush, that beautiful singer, inviting the day once more to enter his pine woods. (So you may hear the wood thrush and whip-poor-will at the same time.) ”

“ The wood thrush breeds with us, and the melody of its notes adds a peculiar charm to our groves and woodlands that would leave an unfilled blank in the choir if the bird were a transient like the hermit or the veery. ”

“ That temperamental bird always chooses peculiarly disagreeable morasses for his home. In the roots of an overturned tree by the side of the deepest and most stagnant pool that he can conveniently find, his nest is built, unlike his twin-brother, the Louisiana water thrush, who chooses the bank of some lonely stream. On that day, while ploughing through mud and water and mosquitoes, I came upon a wood thrush’s nest beautifully lined with dry green moss, with a scrap of snowy birch-bark for its marker. ”

“ No one believes that there will be dawn at all. You cannot prove it by the wood thrush. He sings best, indeed he sings only, in the shadow, and often even in the darkest night he will send out a bell-like note or two that has a soothing, sleepy tintinnabulation as of [Pg 12] cow-bells shaken afar off by drowsy cattle. No, the wood thrush is not a reliable witness, but if you are wise in the ways of field and pasture before dawn, you may take evidence from the chipping sparrow. He is the earliest as he is one of the smallest of the morn-waking birds. ”

“ In these crotches the wood-thrush rears her dwelling, its walls being firmly supported all around by the perpendicular branches. Do these saplings grow for the special benefit of the wood-thrush, or does the feathered artificer accommodate herself to the circumstances, or is there mutual adaptation between bird and bush? That is a problem for the evolutionist.
But the thrush often selects other sites for her nursery. One day I found a nest deftly placed on the point of intersection of two almost horizontal limbs. ”

“ In the New World the nearctic, or North American region, possesses several species of spotted-breasted thrushes breeding throughout its forest area. Notable among these are the wood-thrush, whose mellow, rippling music we know and love so well; the hermit, the olive-backed, the gray-cheeked, and tawny thrushes—spring and fall migrants passing through our woods in May and October. ”

“ Before the last wood thrush had finished his “Good night; all’s well; God is good,” other songs of praise and the joy of life were echoing from swamp and wood and lake margin. Where the birds had ceased a myriad other voices took up new refrains. The dreamy trill of the tree frogs sounds from the perfumed dusk, a lullaby of the world primeval that sang the first man to sleep in some safe refuge in the deep woods. From the distant marsh the mingled voices of innumerable hylas ring a chorus of fairy sleighbells that rises and falls as the wind of evening drifts by. ”

“ The wood thrush has none of theses underbred traits. He regards me unsuspiciously, or avoids me with a noble reserve,—or, if I am quiet and incurious, graciously hops toward me, as if to pay his respects, or to make my acquaintance. I have passed under his nest within a few feet of his mate and brood, when he sat near by on a branch eying me sharply, but without opening his beak ”

“ The song of the Wood Thrush, although composed of but few notes, is so powerful, distinct, clear, and mellow, that it is impossible for any person to hear it without being struck by the effect which it produces on the mind. ”

“ In fact, a bird in all cases roosts where it builds, and the wood thrush occupies, as it were, the first story of the woods.
There is something singular about the distribution of the wood thrushes. At an earlier stage of my observations I should have been much surprised at finding it in these woods. Indeed, I had stated in print on two occasions that the wood thrush was not found in the higher lands of the Catskills, but that the hermit thrush and the veery, or Wilson's thrush, were common. ”

“ Writers tell us that this thrush is very plentiful in certain localities, but in this section of the South I saw only two specimens in four years.
The musician of the thrush family, of the whole woods for that matter, in some points a successful rival of the mocking bird, is the wood thrush. Dark cinnamon brown, of quite a uniform tint above and white breast spotted with round, black, or dark brown enable one to pick him out easily from the rest of the thrush family. I remember hearing one sing at a negro “baptizing” just at sunset of an April day. ”

“ Little paths wound here and there through the forest, as if some one walked in it a great deal. The trees in this part were mostly pine and hemlock, and the ground was covered with a thick carpet of brown needles. The hermit thrush called them from deeper depths of woodland; close by, squirrels frisked and chattered among the branches, and dropped bits of pine-cone on the child's head. Were they tame? she asked; the dwarf said she should judge for herself. ”

“ The Wood Thrush lives in shady lawns as well as in wilder woodlands. He is often a familiar dooryard bird, hopping about on the grass or singing from a low perch. The song is delivered in sections, with pauses of a few seconds between. Some of the notes are rich and deep; others are high and flute-like; others tremble like a twanged banjo string. The alarm-note is loud and sharp.
WILSON’S THRUSH; VEERY
Hylocichla fuscescens fuscescens (Stephens)
Description.—Smaller than Robin. ”

“ Summary.—The animal food of the wood thrush includes remarkably few useful insects and contains some very harmful ones, as the Colorado potato beetle and many of the Scarabæidæ, the larval forms of which are the well-known white grubs which are a pest to agriculture in preying upon roots of plants. ”

“ One wood-thrush’s nest contained two bunting and three thrush eggs. As soon as the bantlings had broken from the shell, the buntings could be readily distinguished from the thrushes, for the former feathered much more rapidly than the latter. When the youngsters were about half grown, they crowded one another considerably in their adobe apartment, but, to all intents and purposes, they lived together in beautiful domestic harmony. ”

“ The wood thrush has the name of a recluse, and, as compared with the omnipresent robin, he may deserve the title; but he is seldom very difficult of approach, if one only knows how to go about it, while his nest is peculiarly easy of detection. ”

“ Next among the true thrushes are the olive-backed, hermit, and allied species. These occur usually in woodlands, and are rather shy, keeping at a distance. The wood thrush inhabits deeply-wooded glens. The mocking thrushes prefer thickets in the neighborhood of dwellings,—for example, the cat-bird. The brown thrush also inhabits thickets, but are not, as a rule, fond of the society of man, while the smaller thrushes, of which the golden-crowned is an example, prefer the woodlands ”

“ Wood Thrush.—Arrives from the North early in October when the aromatic berries of the Magnolia grandiflora are ripe, on which they eagerly feed. On account of this food the flesh is very delicate and large numbers are killed by pot hunters, who call them “Grassets.” In the winter months they appear not to be common and inhabit swampy thickets and bottom woods. ”

“ The young run after the parents, on the ground, for several days after they leave the nest.
As soon as the waters of the Mississippi become so swelled as to over-flow the banks, the Hermit Thrush retires to the nearest hills, and mixes with many other birds, amongst which the Wood Thrush is pre-eminent. The former is, however, easily recognised at once, by its single plaintive note, heard from the boughs of low trees, on the berries of which it feeds. In fact, its food is altogether composed of different fruits and berries, which are at all seasons abundant in our woods. ”

“ A hare sometimes squats-securely in the middle of a ploughed field whilst the sportsman is seeking her in the thick wood; the nest of the grey thrush, built in the bare cleft of a laurel-tree, often escapes the eye of the school-boy more easily than the nest more carefully hidden in the thick bushes ”

“ It is a curious habit the wood thrush has of starting its nest with a fragment of newspaper or other paper. Except in remote woods, I think it nearly always puts a piece of paper in the foundation of its nest. ”

“ From white to buff, with different sized and shaped dark markings. The spots on the Wood Thrush are the roundest and blackest; those on the Veery are the smallest, lightest, and most on the throat; on the Hermit they are longer and run together more like stripes; and those on the Olive-back are most like the Hermit's. ”

“ Our thrushes are all frank, open-mannered [88] birds; but the veery and the hermit build on the ground, where they may at least escape the crows, owls, and jays, and stand a good chance of being overlooked by the red squirrel and weasel also; while the robin seeks the protection of dwellings and outbuildings. For years I have not known the nest of a wood thrush to succeed. ”

“ Fruit collectively amounts to 35.30 per cent, of which 12.14 per cent was thought to be of cultivated varieties and so recorded, while the remainder, 23.16 per cent, was quite certainly of wild species. This percentage of cultivated fruit is more than three times the record of the wood thrush, while the wild fruit eaten is correspondingly less, as the sum total of the fruit consumed is very nearly the same with both birds. ”

“ The hermit thrush soothes his labour with its wonderful song; the pileated woodpecker pounds its disapproval upon a near-by hollow tree; the deer and wolf take a last look out through the trees and flee from the spot forever. A house and barn 168 arise; fields become covered with waving grass and grain; a neglected patch of burnt forest becomes a tangle of blackberry and raspberry; an orchard is set out.
When the migrating birds return, they are attracted to this new scene. The decaying wood of fallen trees is a paradise for ants, flies, and beetles ”

“ He is the least of the thrushes in size, being about that of the common bluebird, and he may be distinguished from his relatives by the dimness of the spots upon his breast. The wood thrush has very clear, distinct oval spots on a white ground; in the hermit, the spots run more into lines, on a ground of a faint bluish white; in the veery, the marks are almost obsolete, and a few rods off his breast presents only a dull yellowish appearance. To get a good view of him you have only to sit down in his haunts, as in such cases he seems equally anxious to get a good view of you. ”

“ It takes a fiery heat, many dry pine leaves added to the furnace of the sun, to temper their strains! Always they are either rising or falling to a new strain. After what a moderate pause they deliver themselves again! saying ever a new thing, avoiding repetition, methinks answering one 270 another. While most other birds take their siesta, the wood thrush discharges his song. ”