Length -- 6 inches. Just a trifle smaller than the English
sparrow
Male and Female -- Chestnut-brown above. A whitish streak,
beginning at base of bill, passes through the eye to the nape
of the neck. Throat whitish. Under parts light buff-brown Wings
and tail finely barred with dark.
Range -- United States, from Gulf to northern Illinois and
Southern New England.
Migrations -- A common resident except at northern boundary of
range, where it is a summer visitor.
This largest of the wrens appears to be the embodiment of the entire family
characteristics: it is exceedingly active, nervous, and easily excited,
quick-tempered, full of curiosity, peeping into every hole and corner it
passes, short of flight as it is of wing, inseparable from its mate till
parted by death, and a gushing lyrical songster that only death itself can
silence. It also has the wren-like preference for a nest that is roofed over,
but not too near the homes of men.
Undergrowths near water, brush heaps, rocky bits of woodland, are favorite
resorts. The Carolina wren decidedly objects to being stared at, and likes to
dart out of sight in the midst of the underbrush in a twinkling while the
opera-glasses are being focussed. To let off some of his superfluous
vivacity, Nature has provided him with two safety-valves: one is his voice,
another is his tail. With the latter he gesticulates in a manner so expressive
that it seems to be a certain index to what is passing in his busy little
brain -- drooping it, after the habit of the catbird, when he becomes limp
with the emotion of his love-song, or holding it erect as, alert and
inquisitive, he peers at the impudent intruder in the thicket below his perch.
But it is his joyous, melodious, bubbling song that is his chief fascination.
He has so great a variety of strains that many people have thought that he
learned them from other birds, and so have called him what many ornithologists
declare that he is not -- a mocking wren. And he is one of the few birds that
sing at night -- not in his sleep or only by moonlight, but even in the total
darkness, just before dawn, he gives us the same wide-awake song that
entrances us by day.