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I have known these fellows attack a whale, and run their beaks right into its side, while the thrasher sticks to its back; and between them they manage to kill the monster, though I believe the sharks benefit most by the hunt. I have seen them caught in the Mediterranean by harpoons, especially off the coast of Sicily.
They were, however, very well bred, with none of the vulgar manners of those who scream and shout and demand their rations. Later in the day I often found the thrasher singing, a little beyond the alders, on the breezy heights of Raspberry Hill. His chosen place was an almost leafless birch-tree, a favorite perch with all the birds of the pasture, and there he sang for hours.
What is that bird, singing on the top of that tall stake?" she asked, pausing to listen, her hand lifted as if to invoke silence. "That? Why, it's a meadow lark," said Steven. "And there is another, 'way up in the top of that tall tree. Oh! how sweet and rich his song is. What is his name?" "That's a red bird, and if thee listens thee can hear a brown thrasher over there in the woods."
"Hush!" whispered Olive; "our Thrasher is singing now in the birch tree, where you can both see and hear him." "That's a sure sign his nest is not very near," said Rap; "for they never sing close by their nests." This Thrasher was clinging to the end of a slender branch, one claw above the other, so that his head, which was thrown back, looked straight up to the sky.
As for Scott, he sat on the parapet, legs swinging, fussing with a pair of binoculars and informing the two people behind him who were not listening that he could distinguish a black-billed cuckoo from a thrasher at six hundred yards. Which edified neither Sylvia nor Duane, but the boy continued to impart information with unimpaired cheerfulness until Kathleen came out from the house.
When the nest down in the brush is finished, and his mate "feels the eggs beneath her wings," his song will grow less full and rich and by the time the young birds come he will have grown silent, as if weighed down with the responsibilities of a family. We get too near the thrasher for his liking and he slips down into the brush. And then, by rare good fortune, a blue-bird begins his song.
I couldn't possibly eat all the things myself, and if you'll bring chafing-dishes and spoons, and those things, I'll cook it, and we can sit round my open fire." Miss Thrasher's room was homelike, with its fire of white-birch and its easy chairs, and Miss Thrasher herself proved to be a pleasant hostess.
I have listened to many a thrasher song in the North, the South, and the West, but have never heard a voice of better timbre than that of one of the tawny vocalists singing that morning, as he sat on the topmost twig of an oak tree and flung out his medley upon the morning air. It is wonderful, anyway, with what an ecstasy the thrasher will sometimes sing.
The sword-fish and thrasher sometimes act together in the attack; the first stabbing him below, and the second belabouring him above, while the whale, unable, or too frightened to fight, rushes through the water, and even leaps its whole gigantic length into the air in its endeavours to escape.
Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing line toward the chicken-yard.
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