(_Seiurus motacilla_) Wood Warbler family
_Length_--6 to 6.28 inches. Just a trifle smaller than the
English sparrow.
_Male and Female_--Grayish olive-brown upper parts, with
conspicuous white line over the eye and reaching almost to the
nape. Underneath white, tinged with pale buff. Throat and line
through the middle, plain. Other parts streaked with very dark
brown, rather faintly on the breast, giving them the speckled
breast of the thrushes. Heavy, dark bill.
_Range_--United States, westward to the plains; northward to
southern New England. Winters in the tropics.
_Migrations_--Late April. October. Summer resident.
This bird, that so delighted Audubon with its high-trilled song as he
tramped with indefatigable zeal through the hammocks of the Gulf
States, seems to be almost the counterpart of the Northern water
thrush, just as the loggerhead is the Southern counterpart of the
Northern shrike. Very many Eastern birds have their duplicates in
Western species, as we all know, and it is most interesting to trace
the slight external variations that different climates and diet have
produced on the same bird, and thus differentiated the species. In
winter the Northern water thrush visits the cradle of its kind, the
swamps of Louisiana and Florida, and, no doubt, by daily contact with
its congeners there, keeps close to their cherished traditions, from
which it never deviates farther than Nature compels, though it
penetrate to the arctic regions during its summer journeys.
With a more southerly range, the Louisiana water thrush does not
venture beyond the White Mountains and to the shores of the Great
Lakes in summer, but even at the North the same woods often contain
both birds, and there is opportunity to note just how much they
differ. The Southern bird is slightly the larger, possibly an inch; it
is more gray, and it lacks a few of the streaks, notably on the
throat, that plentifully speckle its Northern counterpart; but the
habits of both of these birds appear to be identical. Only for a few
days in the spring or autumn migrations do they pass near enough to
our homes for us to study them, and then we must ever be on the alert
to steal a glance at them through the opera-glasses, for birds more
shy than they do not visit the garden shrubbery at any season. Only
let them suspect they are being stared at, and they are under cover in
a twinkling.
Where mountain streams dash through tracts of mossy, spongy ground
that is carpeted with fern and moss, and overgrown with impenetrable
thickets of underbrush and tangles of creepers--such a place is the
favorite resort of both the water thrushes. With a rubber boot
missing, clothes torn, and temper by no means unruffled, you finally
stand over the Louisiana thrush's nest in the roots of an upturned
tree immediately over the water, or else in a mossy root-belaced bank
above a purling stream. A liquid-trilled warble, wild and sweet,
breaks the stillness, and, like Audubon, you feel amply rewarded for
your pains though you may not be prepared to agree with him in
thinking the song the equal of the European nightingale's.