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Updated: June 24, 2025
The olive-backed thrush you will enjoy after your day's work is quite finished. You will see him through the tobacco haze, perched on a limb against the evening sky. He utters a loud joyful chirp pauses for the attention he thus solicits, and then deliberately runs up five mellow double notes, ending with a metallic "ting chee chee chee" that sounds as though it had been struck on a triangle.
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.
I should be glad to know on just what principle the olive-backs and their near relatives, the hermits, distribute themselves throughout the mountain region. Each species seems to have its own sections, to which it returns year after year, and the olive-backed, being, as is well known, the more northern species of the two, naturally prefers the more elevated situations.
Their carriage is preëminently marked by grace, and their songs by melody. Beside the robin, which is in no sense a woodbird, we have in New York the wood thrush, the hermit thrush, the veery, or Wilson's thrush, the olive-backed thrush, and, transiently, one or two other species not so clearly defined.
I don't know why talking of Macaulay always makes me think of Scott, whose books in a faded, olive-backed line, have a shelf, you see, of their own. Perhaps it is that they both had so great an influence, and woke such admiration in me. Or perhaps it is the real similarity in the minds and characters of the two men. You don't see it, you say?
I always find him by this date leisurely chanting his lofty strain; other thrushes are seen now also, or even earlier, as Wilson's, the olive-backed, the hermit, the two latter silent, but the former musical.
The wires are so numerous that they form a barrier through which it is difficult for any bird to fly and come out alive and unhurt. Mr. Beard says that among the birds killed or crippled by flying against those wires near Redding he has seen the following species: olive-backed thrush, white-throated sparrow and other sparrows, oriole, blue jay, rail, ruffed grouse, and woodcock.
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.
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.
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." The Olive-backed Thrush Length about seven inches the same as the Hermit. Upper parts an even olive color all over.
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