THE THRUSH GENUS 395 



tchucks ! in more than one way. They may, for instance, have 

 expressed disapproval of the state of the ground, which had been 

 baked hard by hot weather, or a feeling of internal discomfort 

 due to an insufficient breakfast, or yet again, they may have been 

 caused by a sense of alarm previously excited and in process 

 of subsiding. On another occasion, on the same lawn, I 

 observed a cock blackbird, possibly the same, making a meal 

 of a large moth. I regret to have to say that, having himself 

 completely devoured the body from end to end, he collected 

 the wings and flew off with them in his beak, presumably to 

 his nestlings. During the meal he uttered the same subdued 

 tchuck ! tchuck ! If one wished to put a human interpretation 

 upon his proceedings, one might very well imagine that this 

 blackbird was chuckling to himself in anticipation of the jest 

 he had the bad taste to wish to perpetrate at the expense of 

 his wife and family. The real explanation is, no doubt, quite 

 different ; possibly the " tchucking," like the purring of a cat, expressed 

 merely a sense of satisfaction. 



The tchuck! as we have seen appears to express the less 

 intense emotional states. It corresponds possibly to the tac ! of the 

 ring-ouzel, the tchack ! of the fieldfare, and the tchik ! of the redwing, 

 Many foreign species of the genus appear to have a similar note. 

 The dusky-thrush (T. leucomelas) of South America has exactly the 

 " subdued but querulous chuckle of the blackbird." Thus Mr. H. 

 Durnford in the Ibis (1877, p. 166). In a later number of this 

 periodical (1894, p. 161), another observer, Mr. O. V. Aplin, refers 

 to what is, no doubt, the same note as being " like that of our song- 

 thrush," between whose tchuck and that of the blackbird there is but 

 little difference. The American-robin (T. migratorius) has a " cluck- 

 ing " note that has been syllabled as tuck ! A similar " clucking " 

 note is ascribed to the Cape-thrush (T. olivaceus), and the bare-eyed 

 thrush of South America (T. gymnophthalmus}. 1 



1 Seebohin and Sharpe, Monograph of the Tiirdidce, 1902. 



