THE SONG THRUSH.
We have here a charming picture of one of the finest and noblest of
our song-birds—the thrush, throstle, or mavis. The trees are yet
leafless, but the bird is in the act of building, whilst her mate, on
the tree-top, pours forth his exquisite melody. The almost completed
nest, like a richly ornamented bowl, is before us.
This bird belongs to a grandly musical family, being own cousin to the
missel-thrush and the blackbird, each one having a kindred song, but
all, at the same time, distinctly characteristic.
The colouring of the thrush is soft and very pleasing; the upper parts
of a yellowish-brown; the chin, white; the under part of the body,
grayish white; the throat, breast, and sides of the neck, yellowish,
thickly spotted with dark brown.
[Illustration:
SONG THRUSH AND NEST. [Page 20.
]
The thrush remains with us the whole year, and may occasionally be
heard singing even in the winter, though April, May, and June are the
months when he is in fullest song. They pair in March, and by the end
of that month, or early in April, begin to build. They have several
broods in the year. The nest, which, as we see, is commodious, is
placed at no great height from the ground, in a thick bush or hedge,
and sometimes, also, in a rough bank, amongst bushes and undergrowth.
They are particularly fond of spruce-fir plantations, building on
one of the low, spreading branches, close to the stem. Though the
structure is so solid and substantial, yet it is built very rapidly;
indeed, the thrush seems to be wide awake in all its movements; he
is no loiterer, and does his work well. As a proof of his expedition
I will mention that a pair of these birds began to build a second,
perhaps, indeed, it might be a third nest, on a Thursday, June 15; on
Friday afternoon the nest was finished, and on Saturday morning the
first egg was laid, though the interior plastering was not then dry. On
the 21st the hen began to sit, and on the 17th of July the young birds
were hatched.
The frame-work, so to speak, of the nest is composed of twigs, roots,
grasses, and moss, the two latter being brought to the outside. Inside
it is lined with a thin plastering of mud, cow-dung, and rotten wood,
which is laid on quite smoothly, almost like the glaze on earthenware;
nor is there an internal covering between this and the eggs. The
circular form of the nest is as perfect as a bowl shaped upon a
lathe, and often contracts inwards at the top. The eggs, which are
generally five in number, are of a bright blue-green, spotted over with
brownish-black, these spots being more numerous at the larger end.
The food of the thrush is mostly of an animal character, as worms,
slugs, and snails; and, by seasides, small molluscs, as whelks and
periwinkles. On all such as are enclosed in shells he exercises his
ingenuity in a remarkable way. We ourselves lived at one time in an
old house standing in an old garden where were many ancient trees and
out-buildings, in the old ivied roots and walls of which congregated
great quantities of shell-snails. One portion of this garden, which
enclosed an old, disused dairy, was a great resort of thrushes, where
they had, so to speak, their stones of sacrifice, around which lay
heaps of the broken shells of snails, their victims. I have repeatedly
watched them at work: hither they brought their snails, and, taking
their stand by the stone with the snail in their beak, struck it
repeatedly against the stone, till, the shell being smashed, they
picked it out as easily as the oyster is taken from its opened shell.
This may seem easy work with the slender-shelled snail, but the labour
is considerably greater with hard shell-fish. On this subject the
intelligent author of “British Birds” says, that many years ago, when
in the Isle of Harris, he frequently heard a sharp sound as of one
small stone being struck upon another, the cause of which he, for a
considerable time, sought for in vain. At length, one day, being in
search of birds when the tide was out, he heard the well-known click,
and saw a bird standing between two flat stones, moving its head and
body alternately up and down, each downward motion being accompanied
by the sound which had hitherto been so mysterious. Running up to the
spot, he found a thrush, which, flying off, left a whelk, newly-broken,
lying amongst fragments of shells lying around the stone.
Thrushes are remarkably clean and neat with regard to their nests,
suffering no litter or impurity to lie about, and in this way are a
great example to many untidy people. Their domestic character, too,
is excellent, the he-bird now and then taking the place of the hen on
the eggs, and, when not doing so, feeding her as she sits. When the
young are hatched, the parents may be seen, by those who will watch
them silently and patiently, frequently stretching out the wings of
the young as if to exercise them, and pruning and trimming their
feathers. To put their love of cleanliness to the proof, a gentleman,
a great friend of all birds, had some sticky mud rubbed upon the backs
of two of the young ones whilst the parents were absent. On their
return, either by their own keen sense of propriety, or, perhaps, the
complaint of the young ones, they saw what had happened, and were not
only greatly disconcerted, but very angry, and instantly set to work to
clean the little unfortunates, which, strange to say, they managed to
do by making use of dry earth, which they brought to the nest for that
purpose. Human intellect could not have suggested a better mode.
[Sidenote: _How a Day was spent._]
This same gentleman determined to spend a whole day in discovering how
the thrushes spent it. Hiding himself, therefore, in a little hut of
fir boughs, he began his observations in the early morning of the 8th
of June. At half-past two o’clock, the birds began to feed their brood,
and in two hours had fed them thirty-six times. It was now half-past
five, the little birds were all wide awake, and one of them, whilst
pruning its feathers, lost its balance and fell out of the nest to the
ground. On this the old ones set up the most doleful lamentations, and
the gentleman, coming out of his retreat, put the little one back into
the nest. This kind action, however, wholly disconcerted the parents,
nor did they again venture to feed their young till an artifice
of the gentleman led them to suppose that he was gone from their
neighbourhood. No other event happened to them through the day, and by
half-past nine o’clock at night, when all went to rest, the young ones
had been fed two hundred and six times.
Thrushes, however, become occasionally so extremely tame that the
female will remain upon her eggs and feed her young, without any
symptom of alarm, in the close neighbourhood of man. Of this I will
give an instance from Bishop Stanley’s “History of Birds”—
“A short time ago, in Scotland, some carpenters working in a shed
adjacent to the house observed a thrush flying in and out, which
induced them to direct their attention to the cause, when, to their
surprise, they found a nest commenced amongst the teeth of a harrow,
which, with other farming tools and implements, was placed upon the
joists of the shed, just over their heads. The carpenters had arrived
soon after six o’clock, and at seven, when they found the nest, it was
in a great state of forwardness, and had evidently been the morning’s
work of a pair of these indefatigable birds. Their activity throughout
the day was incessant; and, when the workmen came the next morning,
they found the female seated in her half-finished mansion, and, when
she flew off for a short time, it was found that she had laid an egg.
When all was finished, the he-bird took his share of the labour, and,
in thirteen days, the young birds were out of their shells, the refuse
of which the old ones carried away from the spot. All this seems to
have been carefully observed by the workmen; and it is much to their
credit that they were so quiet and friendly as to win the confidence of
the birds.”
The song of the thrush is remarkable for its rich, mellow intonation,
and for the great variety of its notes.
[Sidenote: _Wordsworth’s Verses on the Thrush._]
Unfortunately for the thrush, its exquisite power as a songster makes
it by no means an unusual prisoner. You are often startled by hearing,
from the doleful upper window of some dreary court or alley of London,
or some other large town, an outpouring of joyous, full-souled melody
from an imprisoned thrush, which, perfect as it is, saddens you, as
being so wholly out of place. Yet who can say how the song of that bird
may speak to the soul of many a town-imprisoned passer-by? Wordsworth
thus touchingly describes an incident of this kind:—
At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
Hangs a thrush that sings loud; it has sung for three years:
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard,
In the silence of morning, the song of the bird.
Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
Down which she so often has tripped with her pail,
And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,
The one only dwelling on earth which she loves.
’Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? she sees
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.
She looks, and her heart is in heaven: but they fade—
The mist and the river, the hill, sun, and shade;
The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.
[Illustration]