24 NUTTALL'S ACCOUNT OF WREN-MUSIC. 



these pamphlets, I had a part : I refer to Mr. William Brewster's paper in 

 the "Annals" of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York City (now 

 the Academy of Sciences), vol. xi., June, 1875, pages 129-146, ou birds 

 observed in Ritchie County, West Virginia. The memoranda of Mr. 

 Brewster, Mr. Euthven Deane, and myself (in my case combined with 

 notes made during previous visits to the same locality) were united in 

 this paper. None of us could hear any mockery in the little bird's vivid 

 and always entertaining concert, from which the cat-bird was not slow to 

 enrich his plagiarized repertory. " The song of the male," Mr. Brewster 

 recorded, " is a beautifully clear and pure one, but it is so always and in- 

 variably the same [the italics are mine] that one soon tires of it. Heard 

 in some deep, silent glen or ravine, its loudness is positively startling, the 

 rocks taking up and flinging back the sound till the air is fairly filled 

 with the ringing melody." 



Lastly, in an extremely interesting paper on this species, contributed 

 to The American Naturalist for January, 1884, Dr. C. C. Abbott de- 

 scribes the year's life of one of these wrens that took up its abode most 

 familiarly upon his farm near Trenton, N. J. In regard to its voice, 

 Dr. Abbott remarks : " Carefully as I have listened to this wren for a 

 year, I have never heard a note that I should consider as not its own, 

 and not borrowed." 



Evidently Thomas Nnttall is responsible for this wren's reputation as 

 an imitator: "remarkable, mimicking, and musical," he calls the bird, 

 and devotes nearly the whole of his biography to a graphic representation 

 of the wren's striking gifts in this direction. 



By means of those queer phonetic syllables of which Nuttall was 

 so fond, he strives to describe in succession the way in which the bird 

 recalls the kingfisher, the tufted titmouse, "his industrious neighbor the 

 ground-robin," the " tremulous trill of the pine-warbler," the blackbird, 

 and several others, many of which had not returned from the far South 

 at the early season when Nuttall became acquainted with onr subject ; 

 so that, as he says, the notes " would appear to be recollections of the past 

 season." None of the examples given are more than a few notes here 

 and there, brief snatches of the songs of the various birds, which, I should 

 say, were suggested rather than imitated ; but it is stated that once the 

 squalling of a child in a cottage was mimicked by a wren at the door. 

 Let me quote a paragraph from Nuttall's charming story : 



"Amidst these imitations and variations, which seem almost endless and 

 lead the stranger to imagine himself, even in the depth of winter, surround- 

 ed by all the quaint choristers of the summer, there is still, with our capri- 



