34 
BY THE WAYSIDE 
pied in guarding against any dangerous 
intruder.” The appearance of the human 
intruder is heralded by the whistled 
Wheeu , which is followed by the loud 
kissing note if the person continues to ad¬ 
vance. If an enemy gets close to some 
nests, the owners seem to lose all timidity, 
and uttering their peculiar, hoarse cry, 
which sounds to me more like the sharp 
tearing of a piece of stout cloth than 
anything else, fly fiercely at him. I have 
had the skin of mv hand broken bv their 
•/ j 
sharp bills when examining nests con¬ 
taining young. This attack is conducted 
with such pathetic desperation and is so 
touching that it makes me feel heartily 
ashamed of myself (when I am its object) 
and I oftimes beat a hasty retreat. 
Much has been said and written in 
praise of the Brown Thrasher’s song. 
Perched in some tree—tall or short, it 
matters not to him so long as he can 
stand among its topmost branches—he 
pours forth his medley. I must, to be en¬ 
tirely candid, confess that I do not like 
it. To my ear it is a confused and queer 
mixture of rapidly repeated notes. As 
Mr. Torrey says: “High notes and low 
notes, smooth notes and rough notes, all 
jumbled together in the craziest fashion.” 
Nevertheless, it has the quality of sin¬ 
cerity and I go away feeling that the 
singer has earnestly tried to do his best. 
The food of this species consists of 
caterpillars, beetles, grasshoppers, and 
fruit of various kinds. In late August I 
have watched them among the rum- 
cherry trees, gulping down cherries— 
pulp and stone together. 
Cats and blacksnakes undoubtedly de¬ 
stroy some of the young in my neigh¬ 
borhood. On one of my rambles I found 
a nest with the bird sitting on three eggs, 
at the foot of a white birch sapling in a 
pasture near some houses. Two days 
later theyoungcame from the shells; the 
next day I found an empty nest and 
scattered about it were the long tail- 
feathers and many small brown ones of 
a Thrasher. I suspect the author of this 
tragedy was a cat which sometimes 
prowled about the pasture. This species 
begins to leave during September. By 
the end of October, all Thrashers (with 
the possible exception of some abnormal 
fellow) have departed for the South. 
— Charles E. Heil, in Bird Lore. 
A Visit With Our Birds in Their Winter 
Homes. 
Every reader of the Wayside knows 
that our robins, bluebirds and song spar¬ 
rows and our other birds so common in 
summer, suddenly leave us in the fall, 
and who that loves birds has not eagerly 
looked for the warblers which arrive from 
the north about the first of September! 
Have we not often wondered where they 
go? Surely our thoughts have some¬ 
times followed them, and we have wished 
that we might journey with them. What 
sights we should see, great forests and 
valleys, lofty mountains, rivers, • lakes 
and often oceans. And what strange 
and beautiful parts of the world we 
should see if we journeyed with some of 
the hardiest travellers, say our merry, 
rollicking bobolink. With, him we 
would go from Florida to Cuba and beau¬ 
tiful Jamaica. Here we might take a 
short rest before launching out upon the 
500 mile journey across the ocean to 
South America, where we would travel 
southward till we reached those great 
waving meadows of Brazil. What a jour- 
nev we have made with the friend of our 
clover-fields, so daintilv liveried in black 
and white, fully as long a journey as from 
New York to England or France. Some 
of our birds go as far as the bobolink or 
even farther, others stay within our 
southern states, while many travel into 
Mexico, and farther down through Cen¬ 
tral America. The past winter I was in 
Costa Rica, Panama, Venezuela, and on 
some islands north of Venezuela and as 
these places are the summer homes of 
many of our birds, I am going to tell 
you what I saw there. In Costa Rica, 
flitting about the tops of trees so tall that 
these birds looked like insects more than 
birds, I found the black-throated green 
warbler, the chestnut-sided warbler, the 
red-start, the worm-eating warbler, the 
Tennesee warbler and the golden-winged 
warbler. They seemed happy and doubt¬ 
less were enjoying their rest and garner- 
