io8^ Rural School Leaflet. 



All at once it forces itself upon, your consciousness and you realize that 

 you have been hearing it all the while. Now that you have noticed it, 

 everything else sinks into insignificance and the top of the tall maple 

 seems to resound with pure, rich, flute-like tones. 



" Come — to — ■ — me " say the first few notes in the sweetest cadence, 

 so deliberate, so majestic, so fully toned for the music of a bird, that 

 we may truly call the author of it the king of songsters. This song we 

 shall remember though we forget all others. It is that of the Wood 

 Thrush. 



The Wood Thrush delays its home coming in the spring until the last 

 of April or the first of May, when the insects and grubs on which it 

 feeds have appeared. During the migration we are likely to find it 

 wherever there are trees, but later, although it sometimes nests in orchards 

 or along the village street, it is more often found in cool woods, especially 

 along the banks of streams. Here it builds a nest very similar to that 

 of the robin, generally in a sapling five to ten feet from the ground. 

 Like the robin, it plasters the nest with mud and reinforces it with 

 sticks and straws, but unlike the robin, the Wood Thrush generally 

 weaves into its nest bits of moss or lichens to prove that it is a wood- 

 loving bird. By this means we can generally identify the nests even 

 when we do not see the bird. The eggs are blue, unspotted. 



In its habits, the Wood Thrush is very similar to the robin, feeding 

 more often on the ground than in the shrubbery or trees. Over 

 seventy per cent of its food consists of insects and insect larvae, injurious 

 grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, wire worms, and caterpillars, also snails 

 and thousand-legged worms. It has a fondness for fruits, but being 

 a wood-loving bird seldom troubles our cultivated fruits but seeks the 

 wild cherries, strawberries, gooseberries, and the like. 



This bird sings to us throughout the nesting season, beginning as soon 

 as it arrives in the spring and continuing until the fall molt (change 

 of feathers) in September. In the latter part of September or the first 

 of October it leaves us for the South, going not farther than Central 

 America, 



Suggestions 



What to look for. — A bird about the size of a robin, above cinnamon 

 brown and below white with large, round, black spots. 



There are several oUier brown thrushes which resemble the Wood 

 Thrush but none has such large and such round spots on the breast. 

 On the \'eerv or Wilson's Thrush the spots are small and inconspicuous. 

 The Hermit Thrush, with spots larger than those of the Veery or Wilson's 



