10 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 



ing places, and will not sing if at all disturbed. 

 Often, while I have been lying on the ground 

 in some secluded glade, I have heard, far in 

 the night, a sudden gush of melody begun by 

 one bird and echoed by another and another 

 all around me, filling the balmy air of spring 

 with a half-cheerful, half-plaintive medley. 

 This is more "common when the moon shines, 

 but I have heard it when the night was black. 

 At several points near the coast of the 

 Carolinas I have found the mocking-bird ap- 

 parently a resident, and yet, so far South as 

 Savannah, Georgia, it seems to shrink from the 

 occasional midwinter rigors. In the hills near 

 the Alabama River, not far from Montgomery, 

 it is certainly resident, but I found it a much 

 shyer bird there than in the thickets along the 

 bayous of Louisiana. Early in the winter of 

 1883 I made a most careful search for the 

 mocking-bird in Pensacola, Florida, and its 

 environs, but found none. I was told that the 

 bird would appear about the last of February. 

 At Marianna, Florida, and along the line of 

 the road thence to the Appalachicola River, I 

 saw it frequently in midwinter. On the Gulf 

 Coast, down as far as Punta Rassa, and across 

 the peninsula to the Indian River country, in 

 the orange, lemon, and citron groves, in the 

 bay thickets, and even in the sandy pine 

 woods, I noted it quite frequently. In this 

 semi-tropical country it is not so shy and so 

 chary of its song, as it is farther north. Near 

 the mouth of the St. Mark's River, as I lay un- 

 der a small tree, a mocking-bird came and lit 

 on the top of a neighboring bush, and sang for 

 me its rarest and most wonderful combination, 

 called by the negroes the " dropping song." 



