380 THE BLACK-BILLED CUCKOO. 



short intervals, and has a rather melancholy, but soothing 

 and pleasing, effect, which sensitive natures readily recog- 

 nize, and do not easily forget. It is the homely pensive 

 poetry of the thicket — that line of land where the culti-' 

 vated beauty and fertility of the fields end and the solitude 

 and gloom of the forest begin. The bird is quite shy and 

 retiring, and therefore but little known. A little smaller 

 than the Chipping Sparrow, or some 5.00 inches long, and 

 therefore the smallest of all our Sparrows, it has the usual 

 colors and marking of that group over the back, lacking 

 the bright chestnut on the crown, so peculiar to the Chip- 

 ping and Tree Sparrows, and the striped crown and spotted 

 or streaked breast, either or both of which are common to 

 the rest of the Sparrows. It may therefore be readily 

 identified. 



The nest, usually placed low in a little bush, sometimes 

 on the ground, is a frail, loose structure which one can look 

 through, mostly of dried grasses and rootlets, lined with 

 the finest of the grasses, fine shreds of bark from the grape- 

 vine, or horse-hair. The eggs, four or five, some .70x.50, 

 are white, sometimes with a slight tinge of greenish or 

 grayish, specked and spotted with a delicate, almost flesh- 

 colored red — really pretty. 



Wintering from the Carolinas southward, and breeding 

 from the same point northward, these birds reach Western 

 New York about the middle of April, and deposit their 

 eggs late in May or early in June. Becoming rare already 

 in Northern New England, it extends somewhat into the 

 British Provinces. 



THE BLACK-BILLED CUCKOO. 



As I pass along, through the thickets, I hear the well- 

 defined notes of the Black-billed Cuckoo — chou^ chou, chouy 



