24 BULLETIN 17 9, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



it. She heard it, "a sweet though simple strain," early in the 

 morning when, as she says, "it was so still that the flit of a wing 

 was almost startling." She continues: "It began with a low king- 

 bird 'K-r-r-r' (or rolling sound impossible to express by letters), 

 without which I should not have identified it at first, and it ended 

 with a very sweet call of two notes, five tones apart, the lower first, 

 after a manner suggestive of the phoebe — something like this: 

 'Kr-r-r-r-r-ree-be' !" 



I remember the first time I heard the kingbird's song. It was 

 on July 8, 1908. I was walking home early in the morning from a 

 professional engagement. It was almost dark; an hour before 

 sunrise; about 3 o'clock. Soon the robin chorus began feebly; the 

 east was be/Coming pale now, and, after a little, a song sparrow 

 and a catbird woke in the dim bushes beside the road. I took a 

 short cut across a meadow, and as I was feeling my way along, I 

 heard a new bird note break out of the darkness in front of me. 

 The bird was beyond the meadow on a rise of ground where I 

 knew there were shade trees, and farther on was an orchard. 



I suspected the singer at once, but I was not sure. The voice 

 was high and sharp, with the squeaky quality characteristic of 

 Tyrannus^ but the arrangement of the notes was wholly strange. 

 They formed a short musical theme of three syllables repeated again 

 and again with a long pause after each one. As I came nearer, 

 however, I found that a part of each pause was filled in by a 

 series of high, short, stuttering notes, given in a hesitating fashion. 

 These notes led up to and immediately preceded the clearly enun- 

 ciated, emphatic theme. I wrote down the whole song as i-i-i-i-i, 

 ee, tweea, with both double e's strongly accented. It was all on 

 one even tone, or nearly so, except at the very end where the pitch 

 either dropped a little (suggesting the song of Sayomis phoebe)^ 

 or rose still higher. 



I sat down on a wall near the invisible singer and waited. Again 

 and again the song came from overhead; the bird was singing vir- 

 tually in black night, shouting out a sharp song, which, in spite 

 of its high, squeaky pitch, was in tune with that peaceful, shadowy 

 hour before the morning twilight. 



Gradually dp-wn brightened the east; green spread over the dark 

 gray meadow. I looked up and saw a kingbird, quietly perched on 

 a branch above my head. 



A few days later Walter Faxon, after listening to the song, re- 

 marked to me, "He is trying to pronounce the word 'explicit,' but he 

 is making a miserable, stuttering failure of it." 



Although heard oftenest in the morning before dawn, the song is 

 occasionally given in the daytime. I have heard it several times on 



