SCRAPING ACQUAINTANCE. 141 
two, or at the most three, of the species singing 
together, and trust his memory to make the nec- 
essary comparison. 
The song of the wood thrush is perhaps the 
most easily set apart from the rest, because of 
its greater compass of voice and bravery of ex- 
ecution. The Wilson’s song, as you hear it by 
itself, seems so perfectly characteristic that you 
fancy you can never mistake any other for it ; 
and yet, if you are in northern New England 
only a week afterwards, you may possibly hear 
a Swainson (especially if he happens to be one 
of the best singers of his species, and, more es- 
pecially still, if he happens to be at just the 
right distance away), who you will say, at first 
thought, is surely a Wilson. The difficulty of 
distinguishing the voices is naturally greatest in 
the spring, when they have not been heard for 
eight or nine months. Here, as elsewhere, the 
student must be willing to learn the same lesson 
over and over, letting patience have her perfect 
work. That the five songs are really. distin- 
guishable is well illustrated by the fact (which 
I have before mentioned), that the presence of 
the Alice thrush in New England during the 
breeding season was announced as probable by 
myself, simply on the strength of a song which 
I had heard in the White Mountains, and which, 
as I believed, must be his, notwithstanding I 
