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Updated: August 16, 2024
When the thrashers departed our larder and our henhouse were empty, and the grocery bill long; but we were only sorry that we could not entertain them more royally, for the men who worked for money at so much the bushel and the men who worked for friendship vied with one another in their labor, and there was no one among them but rejoiced at our success.
Considering the size of the birds, their nests are quite small, not so large as those of the brown thrashers, though the cup is deeper and the architecture more compact and elaborate. A friend describes a nest which he found on a locust tree about sixteen feet from the ground. It was made mostly of dry grass and locust blossoms, with here and there a piece of twine braided into the structure.
If you steal into the thicket you may find the thrushes and the thrashers feeding on the ground. Once in a while one of them shows himself in the morning or the evening, but not often. Nesting done, the brown thrasher ceased his long and brilliant solos from the treetops after the first week of July. Next week the catbird's song was heard for the last time.
The Thrashers, and Catbirds too, were quite silent and invisible; of all the voices that had made the last three months so musical, the Red-eyed Vireo and the Song Sparrow alone persisted in singing, aided by a few Wood Thrushes. "Rap says that August is a poor month for birds about here," said Nat to his uncle; "do you think there will be more of them down at the shore?"
The Killers seizing the Right whale by his immense, sulky lower lip, and the Thrashers fastening on to his back, and beating him with their sinewy tails. Often they come off conquerors, worrying the enemy to death. Though, sooth to say, if leviathan gets but one sweep al them with his terrible tail, they go flying into the air, as if tossed from Taurus' horn. This sight we beheld.
It must have been a sort of survival of these "Thrashers" that my friend, Michael Davitt, many years afterwards, came across somewhere in the North of England. The incident, as described by him, was both amusing and saddening. He addressed them in his capacity as a Fenian Organiser.
Further along, a great blue heron was stalking about the edge of a marshy pool, and further still, in a woody swamp, stood three little blue herons, one of them in white plumage. In the drier and more open parts of the way cardinals, mocking-birds, and thrashers were singing, ground doves were cooing, quails were prophesying, and loggerhead shrikes sat, trim and silent, on the telegraph wire.
Elvira accepted the invitation, and went home with Maggie at the time appointed. She felt at home among these farm festivals, and enjoyed them, the work included, for she had as yet acted only as assistant, and had not felt the responsibility of "cookin' for thrashers" which weighs so heavily on housewives.
Years and years before, prior to railways, prior to mechanical reapers and thrashers, and prior to everything that took men to cities or whirled them and their produce farther in an hour than they ever could have gone in a week, Ibbotsfield and its surrounding villages and hamlets were a reproach to the moral conditions of the day in that they had no sufficiently enormous church.
In the lane, after skirting some pleasant woods, which I meant to visit again, but found no opportunity, I was suddenly assaulted by a pair of brown thrashers, half beside themselves after their manner because of my approach to their nest.
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