412 NOTES ON THE 



within hearing hastens to the place, to learn the cause of the 

 alarm, pressing about with looks of consternation and sympa- 

 thy. At any other season the most perfect imitations have no 

 effect upon him." 



His mocking powers are considerable, but I think them over- 

 rated, or rather, their intentional employment is less than gen- 

 erally claimed by writers. This variety involves fragments of 

 what a lively imagination may so interpret, but closer observa- 

 tion will find them to be legitimately his own by inheritance, 

 and strung with approximate regularity upon the rosary of his 

 exquisitely varied and beautiful song. If I am unduly preju- 

 diced in his favor I shall be pardoned when I say that after a 

 long life of enthusiastic observations of the birds, I have met 

 no species thought to be so well-known that appears to me to 

 be so little known. His life is a perpetual testimony, tested by 

 a practical experience of his own, that "a little (ornithological?) 

 knowledge is a dangerous thing." He is the victim of a ruth- 

 less, unreasonable prejudice that appears to have sprung from 

 his overweening attachment to man which makes him most com- 

 mon, especially in his rural habitations. To this add the fact 

 that generations have slept away the ante- auroral hours of his 

 choicest melodies, and gone to their final rest declaring him 

 devoid of song because, forsooth, they have only heard his 

 harsh calls of warning and caution to his young and recently 

 enlarged family in the proximity of possible danger, or his 

 unassuming, fatherly mew, which has doomed him to his name 

 of Catbird. 



His notes from the top of some bush, ten to twenty feet in 

 hight, rolled out into the air of the fresh dewy gray dawn, are 

 not as loud, nor his strains quite as systematically varied as 

 those of the Thrasher, but they are in individual cases at least, 

 much sweeter and astonishingly refined in every quality. I 

 have never yet engaged the companionship of a connoisseur in 

 listening to this despised bird who has not shared to the utmost 

 my rapturous delight while acknowledging his patent prejudice. 



I do not quite agree with Wilson in his explanation of the 

 causes which have generated so much dislike to this species, 

 yet accept them as sharing in them. 



The Catbirds mostly disappear about the first week in Octo- 

 ber, although I have occasionally seen stragglers as late as 

 November. There is no considerable portion of the timbered 

 or the brushland regions of the State but what harbor them in 

 considerable numbers. 



