Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 14, 2025
I did not see or hear it upon the Wittenberg, which is only a few miles distant, and only two hundred feet lower. In its appearance to the eye among the trees, one would not distinguish it from the gray-cheeked thrush of Baird, or the olive-backed thrush, but its song is totally different.
Its peculiarities were its broad, square tail; the length of its legs, which were three and three quarters inches from the end of the middle toe to the hip-joint; and the deep uniform olive-brown of the upper parts, and the gray of the lower. It proved to be the gray-cheeked thrush, named and first described by Professor Baird.
"Rossland is in your cabin," she whispered. "And John Graham is back there somewhere coming this way. Rossland says that if I don't go to him of my own free will " He felt the shudder that ran through her. "I understand the rest," he said. They stood silent for a moment. The gray-cheeked thrush was singing on the roof.
This bird is one of a group of small thrushes called the Hylocichlæ, of which group we have five representatives in the Atlantic States: the wood thrush; the Wilson, or tawny thrush; the hermit; the olive-backed, or Swainson; and the gray-cheeked, or Alice's thrush. To the unpracticed eye the five all look alike.
Without question I passed plenty of white-throated sparrows, but by some coincidence not one of them announced himself. The gray-cheeked thrushes, which sang freely, were not heard till I was perhaps halfway between the Eagle Cliff Notch and the Eagle Lakes.
Once I timed him, and found that he was on the wing for a few seconds more than a minute. Still further to corroborate my "pet theory," I may say here in a foot-note, what I have said elsewhere with more detail, that before the end of the following month the hermit thrushes, the olive-backed thrushes, and the gray-cheeked thrushes all sang for me in my Melrose woods.
O wild and loose to my soul! O wondrous singer." The gray-cheeked, most charming in every look and motion, uttered his notes in a free sweep or crescendo, which began low, gathered force as he went on, and then gradually died out; all in one long slur, without a defined or staccato note, making a wonderful resemblance to wind sounds, as Emerson expresses it: "His music was the Southwind's sigh."
Do we not wait for the stranger to speak? It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human interest to me. I have met the gray-cheeked thrush in the woods, and held him in my hand; still I do not know him.
Well for us if we are still able to stand in our place and do faithfully our allotted task, like the mountain spruces and the Bethlehemite road-mender. This is making no account of the gray-cheeked thrushes, who are found only near the tops of the mountains. I have since found both species at Willoughby Lake, Vermont and the veery with them.
In the stillness I could hear the whistle of its wings and the splash of the water when it took flight. Near by I saw where a raccoon had come down to the water for fresh clams, leaving his long, sharp track in the mud and sand. Before I had passed this hidden stretch of water, a pair of those mysterious thrushes, the gray-cheeked, flew up from the ground and perched on a low branch.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking