Bird - Lore 



diffuses through its damp shade. No vocal expression could more wonderfully 

 convey this intangible, subduing, pervasive quality of silence; a paradox, 

 perhaps, but not out of place with this bird of mystery. 



Only less appealing are those other chaste singers in the cloud-forest, the 

 Solitaires. It is, indeed, a strange sensation, in uncanny harmony with the 

 unexpected familiarity one always feels in a tropic forest, when, thinking 



vaguely of Thrush 

 songs, the silver note of 

 a Solitaire crystallizes 

 the thought. There are 

 many kinds, and they 

 have varied song-types 

 beyond most similarly 

 unified genera. The 

 most typical is simply a 

 lovely Hermit Thrush 

 song, giving that effect 

 of a private hearing so 

 graciously done by our 

 own Thrushes. For 

 some elusive reason, it 

 seems as if these birds 

 always sang as the shy 

 perquisite of the favored 

 few, and thus, perhaps, 

 it is that their songs 

 never become common. 

 Our own Townsend's 

 Solitaire has a very 

 different melody, a 

 blithe. Grosbeak warble, 

 frequently given in lark- 

 like flight, qmte unlike 

 any of the tropical spe- 

 cies I have heard. These are all of the chaste, contemplative type, given 

 from a perch part way up in the forest, and in frequent accompaniment of 

 splashing water in mossy and fern fringed ravines. Myadestes ralloides, of the 

 Andes, sings almost exactly like a Hermit Thrush, as does Myadestes unicolor, 

 of Mexico, while Myadestes solitarius, of Jamaica, singing from the tree-ferns 

 up on Blue Mountain, reminded me strongly of the Varied Thrush heard in 

 the dark, cold spruce-flats of the Alaskan coast; — what a transposition! A 

 vibrant, steadily crescendo note, as true as a violin, fading to nothing. Then 

 another in a new key, A rich, descending broken scale followed, after a 



TINAMOU (Crypturus) 



