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Updated: June 8, 2025
Down in the thicket, fine, clear, beautiful, like the silver thread of a dream, came the notes of the white-throat the nightingale of the North. Injin Charley knocked the last ashes from his pipe. "Him nice boy!" said he. The young fellow stayed three weeks, and was a constant joy to Thorpe. His enthusiasms were so whole-souled; his delight so perpetual; his interest so fresh!
The white-throat sparrow with its sweet, far-reaching chant; the hermit-thrush with its chime of bells in the calm summer twilight; the vesper-sparrow that ran before him as he crossed the meadow, or sang for hours, as he fished the stream, its unvarying, but scarcely monotonous little strain; the cedar-bird, with its smooth brown coast of Quaker simplicity, and speech as brief and simple as Quaker yea or nay; the winter-wren sending out his strange, lovely, liquid warble from the high, rocky side of Cannon Mountain; the bluebird of the early spring, so welcome to the winter-weary dwellers in that land of ice and show, as he
Birds that haunt woodland edges were singing, spite of their moulting fever; and I heard the Scarlet Tanager, the sweet call of the Crimson Cardinal, the peeping of the Recollet chasing gnats above the water, the lovely, linked notes of the White-throat trailing to a minor infinitely prolonged.
It was stunned, but not killed, and apparently neither leg nor wing was broken. "It is a white-throat sparrow," I said to Nataline, "you know the tiny bird that sings all day in the bushes, sweet-sweet-Canada, Canada, Canada?" "But yes!" she cried, "he is the dearest of them all. He seems to speak to you, to say, 'be happy. We call him the rossignol.
I never shared the enthusiasm of some of my fellow bird-lovers for the sparrows till I knew the white-throat and learned to love the dear little song sparrow. It is unfortunate that the song of the former has been translated into a word so unworthy as "peabody," and that the name "peabody bird" has become fastened on him in New England.
Every time the train stopped, white-throat voices rang out on all sides, and with considerable variety. Many dropped half a tone at the end, and some uttered the triplets on that note, while others began the song on a higher note, and gave the rest a third below, instead of above, as usual. But to return to the singer before us on that memorable day.
Then one flies up into a bush and sings in a high key. What does he say for the song of two short bars surely has words? One person understands it one way, and thinks the bird says 'all-day whittling, whittling, whittling! Some one else hears 'pe-a peabody peabody peabody! While to me the White-throat always says 'I work cleverly, cleverly, cleverly poòr mè cleverly, cleverly, cleverly!"
A white-throat who haunted the neighborhood of my farmhouse did not confine himself to the family song; which, by the way, varies less with this species than with any other I know. At first, for some time, he entirely omitted the triplets, making his song consist of four long notes, the fourth being in place of the triplets.
But if I have really studied one or two nests, and made acquaintance with the tricks and manners of the small dwellers therein, I am satisfied and happy. While we lingered in the little hemlock grove, enraptured with the white-throat, and feeling that "Here were the place to lie alone all day On shadowed grass, beneath the blessed trees," a distant note reached our ever-listening ears.
He would not for worlds scare the poor little prisoners who cheer his lonely hours, and who have long since ceased to fear him. A turtle-dove takes peas, and a hedge-sparrow picks ants' eggs from his lips; a white-throat perches on his left hand to snatch a caterpillar from his right. The huge man was in his garden soon after sunrise gathering the dewy leaves for his feathered pets.
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