Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 21, 2025
I have seldom known two of these birds to be singing at the same time in the same locality, rivaling each other, like the wood thrush or the veery. Shooting one from a tree, I have observed another take up the strain from almost the identical perch in less than ten minutes afterward.
Poets and prose writers alike have lavished epithets on nightingale and mockingbird, wood thrush and veery, yet who, till he heard one, could imagine what its song was like? Yet I must speak of it. Singing was always a serious matter with my bird; that is, he never sang while eating or flying about, interpolating his exquisite notes between two mouthfuls, or dropping them from the air.
I wondered, as he sang, if the veery was the thrush that, to Walt Whitman's fancy, "in the swamp in secluded recesses" mourned the death of Lincoln: Solitary the thrush, The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements, Sings to himself a song.
Then he took out the bird book, settled comfortably on a bench, and with a deep sigh of satisfaction turned to the section headed. "V." Past "veery" and "vireo" he went, down the line until his finger, trembling with eagerness, stopped at "vulture." "'Great black California vulture," he read. "Humph! This side the Rockies will do for us." "'Common turkey-buzzard."
Every day we looked in the woods and listened for cuckoo voices, but every day we were disappointed, until about eleven days later. We were walking slowly down what we called the veery road in the woods, far over the other side from the cuckoo's nest, when we heard a very low but strange baby cry in some thick bushes. It was a constant repetition of one note, a gentle "tut, tut, tut."
On a bank not far off we sat down to wait, talking in hushed tones of the veery, of the oven-bird whose rattling call was now just beginning, of the mysterious "see-here" bird whose plaintive call was sounding from the upper twig of another dead-topped tree, of the hermit himself, when, to our amazement, a small bird soared out of the woods, a few feet above our heads, flew around in a circle of perhaps fifteen feet in the air, and plunged again into the trees, singing all the time a rapturous, thrilling song, bewitching both in manner and in tone.
Injurious insects find their doom when the young house and Carolina wrens are on the wing. Catbirds and robins are among the most abundant breeders, while chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches are less often seen. The bluebird haunts the hollow apple trees, and of the thrushes proper the veery or Wilson's and the splendid wood thrush sing to their mates on the nests among the saplings.
In going from a district of the Old Red Sandstone to where I walk upon the old Plutonic Rock, not fifty miles distant, I miss in the woods, the veery, the hermit thrush, the chestnut-sided warbler, the blue-backed warbler, the green-backed warbler, the black and yellow warbler, and many others, and find in their stead the wood thrush, the chewink, the redstart, the yellow-throat, the yellow-breasted flycatcher, the white-eyed flycatcher, the quail, and the turtle dove.
The zigzag rail fence common to the region surrounded the cleared lots in sight, and in front of the house, across the road, were the wild woods. A wood-thrush, or veery, was pouring out his thrilling, liquid notes as we arrived.
The canary, among foreign birds, and the linnet and bobolink, among American birds, are familiar examples of the first class; the common robin and the veery of the second; the wood-thrush, the cat-bird, and the mocking-bird, of the third; and the blue-bird, the pewee, and the purple martin, of the fourth class.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking