412 NOTES ON THE 
within hearing hastens to the place, to learn the cause of the 
alarm, pressing about with looks of consternation and sympa- 
thy. At any other season the most perfect imitations have no 
effect upon him.” 
His mocking powers are considerable, but I think them over- 
rated, or rather, their intentional employment is less than gen- 
erally claimed by writers. This variety involves fragments of 
what a lively imagination may so interpret, but closer observa- 
tion will find them to be legitimately his own by inheritance, 
and strung with approximate regularity upon the rosary of his 
exquisitely varied and beautiful song. IfIam unduly preju- 
diced in his favor I shall be pardoned when I say that after a 
long life of enthusiastic observations of the birds, I have met 
no species thought to be so well-known that appears to me to 
be so little known. His life is a perpetual testimony, tested by 
a practical experience of his own, that ‘‘a little (ornithological?) 
knowledge is a dangerous thing.” He is the victim of a ruth- 
less, unreasonable prejudice that appears to have sprung from 
his overweening attachment to man which makes him most com- 
mon, especially in his rural habitations. To this add the fact 
that generations have slept away the ante-auroral hours of his 
choicest melodies, and gone to their final rest declaring him 
devoid of song because, forsooth, they have only heard his 
harsh calls of warning and caution to his young and recently 
enlarged family in the proximity of possible danger, or his 
unassuming, fatherly mew, which has doomed him to his name 
of Catbird. 
His notes from the top of some bush, ten to twenty feet in 
hight, rolled out into the air of the fresh dewy gray dawn, are 
not as loud, nor his strains quite as systematically varied as 
those of the Thrasher, but they are in individual cases at least, 
much sweeter and astonishingly refined in every quality. I 
have never yet engaged the companionship of a connoisseur in 
listening to this despised bird who has not shared to the utmost 
my rapturous delight while acknowledging his patent prejudice. 
Ido not quite agree with Wilson in his explanation of the 
causes which have generated so much dislike to this species, 
yet accept them as sharing in them. 
The Catbirds mostly disappear about the first week in Octo- 
ber, although I have occasionally seen stragglers as late as — 
November. There is no considerable portion of the timbered 
or the brushland regions of the State but what harbor them in 
considerable numbers. 
