WILD KALEEGE HYBRIDS 87 
plaintive tremolo. The young birds—nearly in adult plumage as they were—now and 
then varied these sweeter notes with chick-like seeps! and peeps ! 
Gradually working together, with the laughing thrushes drifting along like 
scattered leaves or bounding with high, strong leaps over the low bushes and logs, 
all united in a loose flock, and began feeding slowly downward, usually over a 
southern slope. The greater activity of the thrushes usually carried them several 
yards in advance before they had gone far, but many times I watched the birds at 
a distance, and saw them keep together for a thousand feet or more of descent. 
In such a case I would locate the flock as it crossed an open space well up on the 
mountain, and making a detour, and concealing myself far below in the line of their 
descent, I would be almost certain to intercept them before they reached water. 
The thrushes were almost wholly insectivorous, while the pheasants chose animal 
and vegetable food in equal quantities. 
Whether the relation is mutually helpful in any way or not, it certainly exists. 
And, as I have said elsewhere, while the association may be due solely to the social 
love of birds, it is certainly true that the laughing thrushes many times give the 
pheasants warning of danger visible from trees, which the latter on the ground could 
never detect until too late; then, while the pheasants scratched or pecked to pieces 
some fallen log, I have again and again seen several thrushes stand around, now 
and then springing into the air to seize an insect which had escaped by flight from 
the larger birds. 
Two species of laughing thrushes are thus found in intimate association with 
the pheasants, the black-gorgeted and the black-throated. These were usually in 
separate flocks of from six to eighteen individuals, but now and then I observed 
both species feeding together. When a bare patch of ground or a wide trail is 
encountered, where they are suspicious of danger, the pheasants cross it by a quick 
dash, the laughing thrushes by a single scaling flight. 
After drinking at the rivulet or pools in the ravine bottoms, by which time it 
is almost dusk, the birds fly up into trees to roost for the night. I have never 
actually seen this, being defeated either by the sudden descent of darkness or the 
wary scouting of the birds before they retire. But again and again I have heard 
the heavy, hollow beating against air and leaves as the birds reach a first and often 
a second branch before they settle down, after mumbling a few smothered, low notes. 
By aid of strong moonlight I have seen them sound asleep, seldom alone, but two 
or three close together, a few feet from the trunk, head under wing. 
The few crickets whose instruments were not yet silenced by the chill of the 
autumn night still shrilled faintly; small owls hawked about after droning beetles ; 
a podargus fanned my cheek like the ghost of a bird, and far off in the blackness, 
toward the wild Chinese mountains, came the moan of a leopard. As I turned home- 
ward, a wind—first prophet of to-morrow’s storm—rattled the bamboos, drawing 
forth weird sounds which seemed to verify the Kachin’s belief in the spirit mats 
which wander along every trail at night searching for evil to do. For this reason 
these wild hillmen will never travel at night, and as I trudged toward camp from 
the sleeping pheasants, I knew that whatever dangers the darkness hid at that hour, 
it was from animal not human foes, 
