184 RED-BREASTED THRUSH. 



been frozen up during the winter, are exposed the 

 first melting of the snow, full of juice and in high 

 flavour; shortly afterwards, when the young require 

 them, the parents get plenty of fruit. 



It builds on the branch of a spruce fir-tree, generally 

 about five or six feet from the ground, taking no par- 

 ticular pains to conceal it, and frequently selecting a 

 tree in the immediate vicinity of a house. Its nest is 

 formed, like the European Thrush, of grass and moss 

 interwoven, and lined with dung. The eggs, five in 

 number, are about fourteen lines long, and have a 

 bluish green colour like those of the Common Thrush. 



He is one of the loudest and most assiduous songsters, 

 his notes rather like those of our Thrush, but not so 

 loud. Within the arctic circle the woods are silent in 

 the bright light of noonday, but towards midnight, 

 when the sun travels near the horizon, and the shades 

 of the forest are lengthened, the concert commences, 

 and continues till six or seven in the morning. Even 

 in these remote regions the mistake of those naturalists 

 who have asserted that the feathered tribes of America 

 are void of harmony, might be fully disproved. Indeed 

 the transition is so sudden from the perfect repose — 

 the death-like stillness of an arctic winter — to the 

 animated bustle of summer; the trees spread their 

 foliage with such magical rapidity, and every succeeding 

 morning opens with such agreeable accessions of feath- 

 ered songsters to swell the chorus, their plumage as 

 gay and unimpaired as when they enlivened the deep 

 green forests of tropical climates, that the return of a 

 northern spring excites in the mind a deep feeling of 

 the beauties of the season, a sense of the bounty and 

 Providence of the Supreme Being, which is cheaply 

 purchased by the tedium of nine months winter. 



