22 PROCEEDINGS OP THE 



steads. It is not so with me ; that is my association with his 

 cousin, the Hermit Thrush. My home has always been where 

 suburbs and country meet, where wood-lots and lawns, orchards 

 and gardens are intermingled, and always the Wood Thrush has 

 been one of the birds about the place. Not only have lawn and 

 thickets of shrubbery been his hunting ground, but he has built 

 his nest there as well. In four places where I have lived he 

 has nested within a stone's throw of the porch, twice very close 

 to it. Once it was in a white lilac in the door-yard, and the 

 other time in a wild cherry tree that almost overhung the house. 

 I have happened on his nest, of course, deep in the woods, along 

 an old trail in the Poconos for instance, and I have heard him 

 answering a score of his fellows through the afterglow along the 

 gorges of the Tuscaroras, finding him in both localities outnum- 

 bering the Veery and the Hermit Thrush; but to me he is a bird 

 no more distinctive of these mountains than of our valley of the 

 Wissahickon. Nor is he much more distinctive of such low- 

 land along the creeks than of the higher land about them. I live 

 on a plateau almost a hundred feet above the Wissahickon and 

 a half-mile back from it, but even in that location there are two 

 Wood Thrushes, beside the Wood Thrush of our lawn, that ' ' at 

 the right time of the year" sing every evening within our hear- 

 ing. In the shallow wooded valley between my home and the 

 station through which I pass daily to and from town I used to 

 hear, before the builders invaded it, as many as seven Wood 

 Thrushes singing at once of a June evening. There may have 

 been one or two more, but seven songs were as many as I 

 could distinguish by moving now here and now there so as to 

 he sure I was not misled as to the number by the birds changing 

 their singing stations. All of these seven, of course, may not 

 have made this their home, some coming down perhaps from 

 the higher land about, to join in the evening chorus, that chorus 

 whose dominant phrase is the airoee Nuttall has so wonderfully 

 caught. 



From late April until early August the Wood Thrushes sing 

 throughout our rolling lowlands about Philadelphia, from a day 

 or two after their arrival from the countries about the Carribean, 

 until the approach of the moulting season. A pair whose 



