10 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
ing places, and will not sing if at all disturbed. 
Often, while I have been lying on the ground 
in some secluded glade, I have heard, far in 
the night, a sudden gush of melody begun by 
one bird and echoed by another and another 
all around me, filling the balmy air of spring 
with a_half-cheerful, half-plaintive medley. 
This is more common when the moon shines, 
but I have heard it when the night was black. 
At several points near the coast of the 
Carolinas I have found the mocking-bird ap- 
parently a resident, and yet, so far South as 
Savannah, Georgia, it seems to shrink from the 
occasional midwinter rigors. In the hills near 
the Alabama River, not far from Montgomery, 
it is certainly resident, but I found it a much 
shyer bird there than in the thickets along the 
bayous of Louisiana. Early in the winter of 
1883 I made a most careful search for the 
mocking-bird in Pensacola, Florida, and its 
environs, but found none. I was told that the 
bird would appear about the last of February. 
At Marianna, Florida, and along the line of 
the road thence to the Appalachicola River, I 
saw it frequently in midwinter. On the Gulf 
Coast, down as far as Punta Rassa, and across 
the peninsula to the Indian River country, in 
the orange, lemon, and citron groves, in the 
bay thickets, and even in the sandy pine 
woods, I noted it quite frequently. In this 
semi-tropical country it is not so shy and so 
chary of its song, as it is farther north. Near 
the mouth of the St. Mark’s River, as I lay un- 
der a small tree, a mocking-bird came and lit 
on the top of a neighboring bush, and sang for 
me its rarest and most wonderful combination, 
called by the negroes the “ dropping song.” 
