94 BIRDS IN TOWN AND VILLAGE 



or leisurely manner at intervals again and again, 

 until my curiosity was aroused and I went to the 

 spot to get a look at the bird who had turned 

 his alarm sound into a song and appeared to be 

 very much taken with It. But there was no black- 

 bird at the spot, and no lost drake, and no bird, 

 except a throstle sitting motionless on the bush 

 mound. This was the bird I had been listening 

 to, uttering not his own thrush melody, which he 

 perhaps did not know at all, but the sounds he 

 had borrowed from two species so wide apart 

 in their character and language. 



The astonishing thing in this case was that the 

 bird never uttered a note of his own original and 

 exceedingly copious song; and I could only sup- 

 pose that he had never learned the thrush melody; 

 that he had, perhaps, been picked up as a fledg- 

 ling and put in a cage, where he had imitated 

 the sounds he heard and liked best, and made 

 them his song, and that he had finally escaped or 

 had been liberated. 



The wild thrush, we know, does introduce cer- 

 tain imitations into his own song, but the bor- 

 rowed notes, or even phrases, are, as a rule, few, 

 and not always to be distinguished from his own. 



