482 BULLETIN 203, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



tions. Wendell Taber tells me that he heard two of them singing, and 

 saw one of them "sitting near the top of a birch tree which rose out of 

 the swamp and which towered above all other trees about except bal- 

 sams." He estimated that the bird was about 35 feet above the ground. 

 On another occasion, he saw one in a hemlock grove, a long distance 

 from any water. The bird was very tame, and was "walking around, 

 bobbing, on hemlock limbs." 



Mr. Brewster (1938) gives the following account of the behavior of 

 a bird about a nest he was photographing : 



The female was very nervous and fussy, chirping and calling up her mate the 

 first thing. She would not go on the nest wlien the camera was near it but kept 

 running rapidly about around the bank and the camera, examining the latter as 

 well as the bulb of my rubber tube which lay several yards off with evident dis- 

 trust. When started from the nest she would regularly run six or eight yards, 

 crouching close to the ground and moving with a slow gliding motion, spreading 

 her tail and half spreading and quivering her wings, sometimes turning back 

 and gliding past me or just under the nest, making no sound nor tilting while 

 behaving thus, but presently flying up to some branch or root to tilt and chirp 

 with her mate. 



Again, he writes : "As I was sitting in my canoe this afternoon in a 

 sheltered cove one appeared on the shore within three yards of me. 

 By degrees it approached even nearer running about over some drift- 

 wood, now and then pausing to look at me intently with its large dark 

 eyes. Even when I moved abruptly it showed no fear of me." 



Voice. — Aretas A. Saunders (MS.) describes the song as follows: 

 "The song of the northern waterthrush is a series of rather short, 

 staccato notes, either all equal in time or accelerating toward the end. 

 The number of notes in my 30 records varies from 6 to 15 and aver- 

 ages about 10. The song is loud, and the notes are of sweet, musical 

 quality. They contain marked consonant sounds, with explosive, and 

 liquid, single notes sounding like tleep, tlip, or tlap. 



"The pitch of the song varies from C" to D''", one tone more than 

 an octave. Single songs have a range of from one to three and a half 

 tones, the majority, 16 records, ranging two and a half tones. The 

 general trend of change in pitch, in all songs, is downward. In all 

 but 4 of my records the last note is the lowest in pitch* In all but 6 

 the first note is on the liighest pitch of the song. In 10 of the records, 

 however, the downward trend of the pitch is broken by a single high 

 note, sometimes as high as the first note, near the end of the song, and 

 most frequently the next to the last note. 



"Songs vary from 1% to 2% seconds. In a majority of the songs 

 the first notes are slow, and the remaining notes become gradually 

 more rapid, but 13 of my records show no change in time, the notes 

 all being of equal length. 



"This song may be heard commonly from migrating birds, and, on 

 the breeding grounds, continues until about the middle of July. I 



