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SEVERAL years ago, while reading in an old number of the Atlantic Monthly an admirable description by Wilson Flagg of the song of the hermit thrush, I came upon the following sentence: "I have not been able to detect any order in the succession of these strains, though some order undoubtedly exists and might be discovered by long-continued observation." This suggested a question: Had any one ever attempted to solve the old naturalist's problem? So far as I could remember, no one among the hundreds of observers who had exhausted their vocabularies in descriptions of thrush songs had made the effort, not even Solomon Cheney in his delightful Wood Notes Wild, nor Schuyler Mathews, whose musical notations of thrush songs were so accurate and so sympathetic. The thought flashed upon me that here was an unoccupied field, a territory into which perhaps only the most sanguine would dare to venture, but still a region unexplored and alluring in possibilities. Such a temptation was irresistible, and when spring brought once more the liquid sound of wood thrush notes, with the rarer whispered songs of migrating hermits, olive backs, and veeries, I began my task, not without some misgivings as to my success, but sure of one thing, that, even if the problem proved insoluble, the search itself would be a delightful occupation.

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Spring and summer, then, I listened to thrushes in Ohio, New England, and Canada; tramping beside sluggish western streams or along ravines carved out of the Ohio plains, scrambling through New England woods and pastures, climbing mountains in Canada, or rowing along the rocky shores of northern lakes. At the outset I encountered a difficulty, that I never could wholly overcome, in the problem of determining the form of the phrases I heard. I had to learn to ignore all sorts of conflicting sounds, from the notes of rival singers to locomotive whistles, to adjust a pitch pipe to match a tone held in the memory while the bird himself was uttering a different one, and to accustom myself to the occasional sudden introduction by any singer of new variations in his song. But the thrushes' delivery was slow, their phrases were repeated continually, and the tones themselves were so clear that before long the matter of recording became somewhat less perplexing, although never

very easy.

But in the process of learning to identify the songs by the pitch-pipe a new difficulty appeared in the absence of any recognized way of representing the sounds actually uttered by the thrushes. The birds' pitch was of course entirely free, whereas the musical staff provided for only a conventional series of tones differing by fixed intervals; and when

the pitch-pipe faithfully recorded intermediate quarter or eighth tones that is, a trifle sharp or flat-there was no way of representing them. I experimented for a while with various devices, hoping that I might discover some way to record the actual sounds, but I finally abandoned the problem as practically insoluble. As the study of the birds' songforms progressed I came, however, to console myself for the lack of exactitude by the discovery that thrushes tended steadily to approximate the intervals of the human scale. They were rarely just on the key, but they were generally close to it, never failing to suggest the conventional pitch.

Having determined, then, while recognizing the imperfections of my method of recording, to use it as a fairly satisfactory one, I amassed a great number of thrush song-forms, and from these I derived the following facts, noted from wood thrushes in Ohio, Massachusetts, and Quebec. From the beginning, I was greatly surprised to discover how few really distinct phrases the wood thrushes used. Very many had no more than three, the great majority used but four, and only a few had as many as five or six. The finest singers I heard were

usually those with only four phrases, which they uttered with such beauty of modulation, and such deliberate excellence, as to suggest the thought expressed by Thoreau: "He confines himself to his few notes, in which he is unrivaled, as if his kind had learned this and no more anciently."

These phrases, whether in the eastern or western parts of the wood thrush range, were all very much alike. I have not recorded over twenty different forms, yet only once did I hear precisely the same set used by two birds. In this case they were near neighbors along the river bank, father and son, perhaps, I thought. All the other sets of phrases which I recorded were individual and unmistakable, often coinciding in two phrases or three, only to differ sharply in one or two others.

Here is a typical example of a thrush song with four phrases. Of course it does not pretend to give the actual sounds, or to enable one unfamiliar with the bird to reproduce the song, for the timbre, the unique, individual wood thrush voice, is not to be hinted at by such means. All it does is to symbolize roughly the tones of the musical scale, to which the thrush approximated.

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It will also be observed that these four phrases seemed to form part of a broken melody. The first was introductory in character, uttered with the bird's richest tones, round and liquid, with an organ tremolo or pulsation on the last note quite unmatched for vibrant beauty by any other bird of the region. The next phrases seemed to continue the musical progress, the second being a cadence into the key of D, the third an arpeggio leading back into G again; and each of these was sharper and more metallic in quality than the first one, the third being especially rapid and brilliant, equal in dexterity to any of the brown thrasher's roulades, and far finer in tone. The last phrase, which was thin and reedy, seemed to be a sort of conclusion to the song.

With much the same words the songs of all the other forty odd wood thrushes I studied might be described; for whether

they consisted of three themes only, or as many as six or seven, they always had one or more phrases corresponding in musical character to those shown above, and the vocal quality was adjusted after the same manner. The introductory phrases were always rich, full, and round, the continuing ones were less steady in tone, more brilliant, but liable to contain squeaky notes, and the final one was generally soft and reedy. The thrushes did not always hold so clearly to the key as did the "ravine" wood thrush, for now and then one would introduce accidental notes, and occasionally one would sing persistently off the pitch; but the tendency was to adhere to some one key.

Here are some other examples, beginning with a thrush who, during months. of observation, never used more than three phrases. For convenience we will call him

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But what of the order in which these thrushes sang? That problem proved relatively simple, once the phrase-forms had been identified, for the slowness and precision of the thrushes made it easy to record long series. I collected many such, running into the hundreds for some birds, taken at various times and under all sorts of conditions; and from a study of these it appeared that the wood

thrushes, while singing with free choice, tended to use their themes so as to produce as much variety as possible without violating the musical character of the phrases themselves. Further, each one had a favorite order, or set of orders, from which he would vary, but to which he would return unfailingly. Here, for instance, is the phrase sequence of a thrush noticeable for his regularity.

THE SWAMP WOOD THRUSH.

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The "riverbank" thrush, with only thrush, with only three phrases, used them after the following manner: 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,3,2; 1,3,2; 1,3,2,3.

The "roadway" thrush used his five phrases in varying orders, always seeming to lead off with the low phrase, but using his fifth or conclusion phrase very little, as follows: 1,2,4,3,4; 1,2,4,3; 1,2,4,3,4; 1,2,3,4,3; 1,2; 1,4,2; 1,4,2,3,2; 1,2,3,4,5.

The " pasture "thrush used his five phrases more equally, but seemed to have certain favorite orders, as follows: 1,2,3,4; 1,5,2,3,4; 1,4; 1,2,3,4; 1,5,2,3,4. Examples might be furnished of an indefinite number of these song orders. A thrush would often sing apparently at random for a moment, but soon one of the familiar sequences would reappear, the one thing never done by thrushes in full song being to repeat the same phrase twice in succession.

It was contrast which lent its great charm to the wood thrush song as compared with the far more elaborate strains of sparrows or bobolinks, contrast of tone and timbre as well as in the succession of phrases. Only the catbird and brown thrasher offered anything similar, and their delivery was so jerky and their tone quality at best so inferior that in emotional effect the simpler wood thrush far surpassed.

Take the song of a fine singer, such as the "lagoon" thrush, neighbor of the "riverbank" and "pool" thrushes, but distinctly superior. With deliberation he uttered a sudden clear, round, vibratory phrase, the little staccato notes following "like the jingling of steel," as Thoreau

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Then would come the first again, then the third, and so on, the four phrases being employed so as to produce continual variety and contrast.

Is there any apparent reason for the order relations which the birds seemed to prefer? Yes and no. The singers did not hesitate to leave progressions unfinished, and did not feel bound to abstain from any particular successions, but still they seemed to prefer to use their phrases in a way comporting with their character. They did not sing them at random, nor did they use the conclusion phrase to begin combinations; but seemed, as the above examples have shown, to prefer such successions and variations as an orchestral composer would employ. It was this apparent deliberate choice which marked off the wood thrush from such singers as the bobolinks, the orioles, the sparrows, or finches, which repeated like an involuntary expression of joy the same

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