24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE 



of my house onto the Robin's nest but three feet below in the 

 trumpet vines and the bird will only flutter off, with a half pro- 

 test, and alight on the pear-tree ten feet away, scolding from 

 time to time until I withdraw. The Wood Thrush is alarmed 

 to the point of terror if I but once visit his nest in the nearby wild- 

 cherry, and sometimes if you, more than once, no matter how, 

 visit a nest conspicuously situated he will desert it. It is an 

 easily found nest often within reach of the passerby and seldom 

 higher than twenty feet from the ground. A crotch of a spice- 

 wood bush is a favorite situation, or some twiggy place toward 

 the extremity of a long, horizontal limb of a red maple. 

 Almost always if in the woods itself it is near some clearing or 

 along some path or waterway. Very often, like the Catbird, 

 the Wood Thrush will put a white rag or piece of paper among the 

 leaves that make the nest's foundation. Upon these he rounds 

 the walls of mud, which he lines with black rootlets that well 

 offset his deep-blue eggs. Four eggs is the usual number, but 

 often there are only three. Five I never found but once, and 

 then the fifth was a Cowbird's, the only time I ever found that 

 egg in the nest of a Wood Thrush. Nor have I ever come upon 

 a Wood Thrush feeding one of those gray youngsters, fat and 

 complaining, as I have so often upon Redeye and Song Sparrow 

 and Black-and-White Creeper. It is not, of course, that the 

 Wood Thrush is more intelligent than these birds in disposing 

 of the intruder's egg, but that it is seldom deposited there, and 

 that when it is the nest is apt to be abandoned because of the 

 sensitiveness of the Wood Thrush to any disturbance of his 

 home. 



June is the month, I think, during which the Wood Thrushes 

 are most constantly in evidence on lawn and wood-floor. Cer- 

 tain it is that I see more, both young and old, about our place 

 then than at any other time. In my walks in the Wissahickon 

 woods, too, I meet the Wood Thrushes most frequently in this 

 month, though there are many, especially fledglings, about in 

 early July as well. Wood Thrush song lessens considerably in 

 late July, but in woods and on shaded lawns the birds are still 

 often to be come upon until mid-August. From this time on 

 I hear them scolding much more frequently than I see them. 



