FAMILY Icteridz. 
swamp, or the swimming pool in the springtime coloring 
which the French artist Corot so much loved to paint. I 
. call to mind a bulrush-bordered pond in the Middlesex 
Falls, near Boston, where one lovely spring afternoon I 
heard a dozen Redwings ‘‘ gurgling” away like the 
rippling of a brook. After studying the singers and 
their songs for a full half-hour, there suddenly dawned 
upon my mind the unmistakable evidences of concerted 
harmony in the music; then, selecting the songs of six, 
I arranged them in proper order, with the result shown 
below, excepting the words (!) and the accompaniment, 
which were added later.* 
This is really the proper way to study bird music; the 
responsive character of the song is a strong factor in the 
complete understanding of it. Half the bird songs we 
hear are questions, the other half are the answers! 
In spring the male Redwings arrive first, sometimes 
in large flocks. It is fully two to three weeks later be- 
*Of course the birds sang this one octave higher than it is 
written. 
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