Brown, Olive or Grayish Brown, and Brown and Gray Sparrowy Birds 
Mississippi. There they stay all summer, often travelling south- 
ward with the sparrows in the autumn, as in the spring. 
Why they should prefer coniferous trees, unless to utilize the 
needles for a nest, is not understood. Low trees and bushes are 
favorite building sites with them as with others of the family, 
though these thrushes disdain a mud lining to their nests. Those 
who have heard the olive-backed thrush singing an even-song 
to its brooding mate compare it with the veery’s, but it has a 
break in it and is less simple and pleasing than the latter’s. 
Louisiana Water Thrush 
(Seiurus motacilla) Wood Warbler family 
Length—6 to 6.28 inches. Just a trifle smaller than the English 
sparrow. 
Male and Female—Grayish olive-brown upper parts, with con- 
spicuous white line over the eye and reaching almost to the 
nape. Underneath white, tinged with pale buff. Throat 
and line through the middle, plain. Other parts streaked 
with very dark brown, rather faintly on the breast, giving 
them the speckled breast of the thrushes. Heavy, dark bill. 
Range—United States, westward to the plains; northward to 
southern New England. Winters in the tropics. 
Migrations—Late April. October. Summer resident. 
This bird, that so delighted Audubon with its high-trilled 
song as he tramped with indefatigable zeal through the hammocks 
of the Gulf States, seems to be almost the counterpart of the 
Northern water thrush, just as the loggerhead is the Southern 
counterpart of the Northern shrike. Very many Eastern birds 
have their duplicates in Western species, as we all know, and it is 
most interesting to trace the slight external variations that differ- 
ent climates and diet have produced on the same bird, and thus 
differentiated the species. In winter the Northern water thrush 
visits the cradle of its kind, the swamps of Louisiana and Florida, 
and, no doubt, by daily contact with its congeners there, keeps 
close to their cherished traditions, from which it never deviates 
farther than Nature compels, though it penetrate to the arctic 
regions during its summer journeys. 
With a more southerly range, the Louisiana water thrush 
does not venture beyond the White Mountains and to the shores 
of the Great Lakes in summer, but even at the North the same 
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