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Brown, Olive or Grayish Brown, and Brown and Gray Sparrowy Birds 
English poets have lavished upon the nightingale? Undoubtedly 
because it lifts up its heavenly voice in the solitude of the forest, 
whereas the nightingales, singing in loud choruses in the moon- 
light under the poet’s very window, cannot but impress his 
waking thoughts and even his dreams with their melody. 
Since the severe storm and cold in the Gulf States a few win- 
ters ago, where vast numbers of hermit thrushes died from cold 
and starvation, this bird has been very rare in haunts where it 
used to be abundant. The other thrushes escaped because they 
spend the winter farther south. | 
Alice’s Thrush 
(Turdus alicia) Thrush family 
Called also: GRAY-CHEEKED THRUSH 
Length—7.5 to 8 inches. About the size of the bluebird. 
Male and Female—Upper parts uniform olive-brown. Eye-rin 
whitish. Cheeks gray; sides dull grayish white. Sides o 
the throat and breast pale cream-buff, speckled with arrow- 
shaped points on throat and with half-round dark-brown 
marks below. 
Range—North America, from Labrador and Alaska to Central 
America. 
Migrations—Late Aprilor May. October. Chiefly seen in migra- 
tions, except at northern parts of its range. 
One looks for a prettier bird than this least attractive of all 
the thrushes in one that bears such a suggestive name. Like the 
olive-backed thrush, from which it is almost impossible to tell it 
when both are alive and hopping about the shrubbery, its plu- 
mage above is a dull olive-brown that is more protective than 
pleasing. 
Just as Wilson hopelessly confused the olive-backed thrush 
with the hermit, so has Alice’s thrush been confounded by later 
writers with the olive-backed, from which it differs chiefly in 
being a trifle larger, in having gray cheeks instead of buff, and in 
possessing a few faint streaks on the throat. Where it goes to 
make a home for its greenish-blue speckled eggs in some low 
bush at the northern end of its range, it bursts into song, but 
except in the nesting grounds its voice is never heard. Mr. 
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