They have a sweeter disposition when the water is com- 
ing down in the soft, misty way that the Northwest knows. © 
Then their plaintive strain, carrying the mystery and wild- 
ness of high altitudes or of the solitudes of their summer 
- homes in Alaska or on Mount Rainier, fascinates those who 
know its dual quality. The peculiar call may change in key 
in the same individual as well as in different singers. They 
have been heard in early morning trying their one note in | 
different places on the scale until they found the tone that 
satisfied the mood of the hour. The carrying quality of this 
musical sound is great and to one who hears it for the first 
time, it is bewildering in its location. 
in early spring, a Varied Thrush may mount _ the top 
_ of the tallest tree he can find in the neighborhood and try 
his clarionet again and again, while you search for him in 
vain. .Once a woman followed the lure in the melancholy 
theme for half a mile over the rough surface of a new 
clearing to be rewarded by a long look at the musician as he 
sat on the tip of a dead fir owning the world. He was most 
accommodating as he turned from one point of the compass 
to another, in showing the tawny buff stripes across the 
sides of his face, the two shoulder bars of the same color on 
each wing, while his black collar, from the distance, seemed 
to be made of real lace. 
His ballads as described by those who have heard them 
in the forests of their summer homes are said to be the gems 
of their poet hearts. Mr. Dawson, in “The Birds of Wash- 
ington’ wrote: “There is no sound of the Western woods - 
more subtle, more mysterious, more thrilling withal, than 
this passion song of the Varied Thrush. Sombre depths, 
dripping foliage, and the distant gurelings of dark brown 
- waters are its fitting accompaniments; but it serves some- 
how to call up before the mind’s eye the unscaled heights 
and the untried deeps of experience. It is suggestive, 
elusive, whimsically baffling—Moreover, this bird can fling 
his voice at you as well from the treetop as from the ground, 
102 
