BIEDS AND THE AETS 103 



lyrics of tropical birds' lives and loves being expressed in 

 colour rather than sound. But English and European 

 birds are by no means the finest singers in the bird 

 world. The singing birds of the United States (blue- 

 bird, hermit thrush, bobolink, etc.) are but little if at 

 all inferior to our own , and the mocking birds of temperate 

 South America are of the royal purple in song. There is 

 a very beautiful description of the white-banded mocking 

 bird's (Mimus Triurus) song in Mr. Hudson's " Birds 

 of La Plata," and he concludes : " Shortly after hearing 

 it, I visited England, and found of how much less account 

 than this Patagonian bird, which no poet has ever 

 praised, were the sweetest of the famed melodists of the 

 Old World." No, but a prose-poet has. 



SONG THRUSH IN DECEMBER 



While walking across St. James's Park on December 

 19, about 1 o'clock, I was surprised to hear a song- 

 thrush in full song. Is not this extraordinarily early for 

 the thrush to resume his song? Gilbert White gives 

 January 6 as the earliest day in his experience, and 

 Markwick gives January 15. Usually, I think, the song 

 is not heard before February. I do not recollect ever 

 before to have heard the song-thrush in December. 



W. M. CROOK. 



December 24, 1904. 



NOTE. I am diffident in disagreeing with Mr. Crook, 

 but my experience is that the song-thrush sings the whole 

 winter through if the weather is kind though amateur- 

 ishly, patchily, and infrequently. He possesses, in fact, 

 precisely the popular notion of the " artistic tempera- 

 ment," buoyant and impressionable to the faintest soften- 

 ing of the season and a ' * too-quick despairer ' ' when times 

 are hard. His adventurous Esau of a relative, the mistle- 

 thrush, on the other hand, never sings until February. 



