United States or Belarus ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Then he makes another onset with a similar result; and these manoeoeuvres are repeated, till the creeper becomes disgusted, and takes to another tree. The olive-backed thrushes and the hermits may be looked for every spring and autumn, and I have known forty or fifty of the former to be present at once. The hermits most often travel singly or in pairs, though a small flock is not so very uncommon.
The last two were pitched a little lower, and were shorter, with the accent on the first of the pair; they were thinner in tone than the opening triplet, as is meant to be indicated by the difference of spelling. Altogether, they were a gorgeous company. But the chief singers were the olive-backed thrushes and the winter wrens.
"This Olive-backed Thrush you may hear more often than see he is a will-o'-the-wisp for shyness, whether on his journeys or about home. "Won't you let us go up to the wonder room now and see all these Thrush cousins in a row?" asked Nat, when the Doctor had finished describing them.
Last May I glanced up from my book and espied an olive-backed thrush in the back yard, foraging among the currant-bushes. Raising a window quietly, I whistled something like an imitation of his inimitable song; and the little traveler always an easy dupe pricked up his ears, and presently responded with a strain which carried me straight into the depths of a White Mountain forest.
You may find him nesting about the White Mountains, on or near the ground, with the Olive-backed Thrush and Winter Wren. In other places he may be seen as a visitor any time in spring and autumn, or may even linger about the whole winter.
From the forest came the evening hymn of a thrush, the olive-backed perhaps, like but less clear and full than the veery's. In the evening we sat about the fire in rude homemade chairs, and had such broken and disjointed talk as we could manage.
He puts his beak down into the swamp, in search of insects and snails or other marine life est-ce que je sais? and drawing in the bog-water through holes in his beak, makes a booming sound which is most impressive. Now do not think me an ornithologist or a bird sharp. Personally I do not know a bittern from an olive-backed thrush.
Of course we all know that our robin is a true thrush, young robins having their breasts thickly spotted with black, while even the old birds retain a few spots and streaks on the throat. If we search behind the screen of leaves and grass around us we may discover many tragedies. One fall I picked up a dead olive-backed thrush in the Zoological Park.
Every loiterer about the woods knows this pretty, speckled-breasted, olive-backed little bird, which walks along over the dry leaves a few yards from him, moving its head as it walks, like a miniature domestic fowl. Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body.
Olive-backed thrushes, black-poll warblers, crossbills, pine linnets, and Canada jays, all of which I had myself seen in the White Mountains, were none of them here; but instead, to my surprise, were wood thrushes, scarlet tanagers, and wood pewees, the two latter species in comparative abundance.
Word Of The Day