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The run was repeated, and the mischievous bird continued the annoyance until his victim was exhausted, panting, and in great excitement. From that day the Mexican gave up the contest with his too lively antagonist, and refused to come out of his cage at all; so that in fact the stranger reduced the colony to submission. With the wood-thrush, the encounters differed from both the preceding.
That evening, listening on the piazza to the usual twilight chorus, the wood-thrush far-off, the towhee from the pasture, the robins all around, I heard suddenly the "quee-o" of a bird I knew, so near that I started, and my eyes fell directly upon him, standing on the lowest limb of a dead tree, not ten feet from me.
If it does not look like play with her, it at least looks like leisure and quiet contemplation. 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 the whole world as honest as itself.
In the nook were silence and delicious odors of the woods; from a thick shrub on one side came the sweet erratic song of a cat-bird, and at a little distance the rich organ-tones of the wood-thrush. All these entered the soul of the emancipated bird; he listened, he looked, and at last he spoke, a low, soft, "wee-o."
Then she laughed in her turn, and loudly; but so sweetly that the sound of her voice mingled with the first song of a newly awakened wood-thrush sitting on a rowan twig on the edge of the Wood-lawn.
The bobolink, the veery, or Wilson's thrush, the red thrush, and the golden robin, are silent after the middle of July; the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, and the common robin, not until a month later; but the song-sparrow alone continues to sing throughout the summer.
Then, at length, a Veery's delicious note rose in a fountain of liquid melody from beneath me; and when it was ended, the clear, calm, interrupted chant of the Wood-Thrush fell like solemn water-drops from some source above I am acquainted with no sound in Nature so sweet, so elevated, so serene. Flutes and flageolets are Art's poor efforts to recall that softer sound.
The cardinal, cat-bird, and our unrivalled songster the wood-thrush, all help themselves in the same wasteful fashion. One can't shoot wood-thrushes. We should almost as soon think of killing off our Nilssons, Nevadas, and Carys. The only thing to do is to protect the clusters; and this can be accomplished in several ways.
She liked to have me call her early and go tiptoing and whispering about our preparations and to wade off through the dewy grass in her rubber boots, leaving the rest of the house asleep. She generally carried the basket, and was deeply interested in my maneuvers when the cry of the "teacher"-bird and the call of the wood-thrush did not distract her attention.
The Wood-Thrush sings at almost all hours of the day, though seldom after sunset. He delights in a dusky retreat, and is evidently inspired by solitude, singing no less in gloomy weather than in sunshine. Late in August, when other birds have mostly become silent, he is sometimes the only songster in the wood.
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