CHAPTER IV

THE HERMIT-THRUSH

Thrush, thrush, have mercy on thy little bill; I play to please myself, albeit ill; And yet--though how it comes to pass I cannot tell-- My singing pleases all the world as well.

Montgomery.

Hermit that it is, this little thrush is known and loved in nearly all of North America. True, there are several of its relatives about in fields and woods, which are taken for the hermit by those who have not compared the different birds; the plain, deep olive-brown above, with dotted creamy vest, being a popular dress with the thrushes.

The hermit answers to several names, suiting the location in which it is found. In low parts of the South it is known as the swamp-robin. You meet it in the damp, shady places where it is always twilight, in the fascinating grounds of the snails and water-beetles.

It likes such clammy, silent neighbors, with their retiring habits and proper manners, for the reason that it is able to turn them to some account at meal-time, which, as is the case with most birds, is all the time, or any time. (It is said to resemble in habits and notes the English song-thrush, which is known to spend most of its time at certain periods of the year hunting snails, which it has learned to dress for eating by slapping them against a stone. It will choose a stone of the proper shape, to which it carries its snails as often as it has good luck in the hunt, leaving little heaps of shell by the stone to mark its picnic-ground.)

Family affairs bring little labor to a pair of hermits, for they have not far to go in search of nesting materials. They take what is close at hand, little dry twigs, lichens, and last year's leaves crumbled and moist, which soon lose their dampness and adhere together in a thick mass.

But few have found it, this nest of the hermit, hidden under the bushes where it is always shadowed, and where the fledglings may help themselves to rambling insects without so much as stepping out of the door. They are supposed to take advantage of this nearness to food by remaining about the nest later than most birds; or if they run, returning on foot of course, having tardy use of their wings, but learning to stretch their legs instead. And well may they learn to "stretch their legs," as they will come to their fortunes by "footing it" mostly, when they are not migrating on the wing.

Like the thrashers, the hermit must scratch for a living when berries are not ripe. By listening one may hear the bird at its work, and by slipping quietly in the dusk of the early morning to the lowlands, or the thick woods, and standing stock-still for a while, even see it. But nearly always it is under cover on the edge of thickets, where the leaf-mold is unstirred and richest. And always by its own self is the hermit, as if it loves nature better than the company of its fellows, listening now and then for underground or overhead sounds, and dwelling on the beauty of the leaf skeletons it overturns like a botanist.

Lace-work and dainty insertion in delicate threads does Madam Hermit find in her resorts--fabric so marvelous and fascinating she could admire it forever; cast-off finery of such insects as outgrow their clothes, grasshopper nymphs, and whole baskets full of locusts' eggs hidden in half-decayed logs, and making a nourishing breakfast, "rare done" and delicious. She delights in the haunts of the praying-mantis at egg-laying season, surprising the wonderful insect in her devotions, who scarcely has time to turn her head on her foe before she disappears from sight.

It is well for her thus to disappear suddenly, for she is spared witnessing the fate of her newly laid eggs just above her on the twig, their silken wrapper being no obstruction in the way of Madam Hermit finishing her meal on them.

These habits of the hermit-thrush mark the dwarf-hermit in southern California. We see it in the orange-groves after irrigation or during a wet winter. Plenty of mulching in the orchards invites the dwarf (where it is a hermit like its relative), and we find it scratching away in the litter, overturning frail little toadstool huts and umbrellas, and exchanging greetings with its neighbor, the varied thrush, under the next tree.

Here in the cañons, where the brooks turn right side up for one brief season in the long, dry year, we see the little olive-brown bird with its speckled breast. Its sight and hearing are keen, so that it detects the whereabouts of the stone-flies, lingering among the moist rocks until they come out for a drink or a bath, when--that is the last of them.

The dwarf brown beauty, which, of course, must have victuals by hook or crook, never breaking a single law in either case, loves the watery haunts of the dragon-flies.

It passes by the pupa-skin drying on its leaf-stalk just as it was outgrown, with perchance a glance at the reflection in the water; but the cunning bird neglects not to take in the pupa itself, making its own breakfast on undeveloped mosquitoes in the water's edge.

All winter long about our home lives the dwarf hermit, eating crumbs at the garden table and looking for belated raspberries on the ever-green canes. Early, before the sun is up, the bird runs along under our windows, where the myrtle covers the tracks of night insects, and rings its tinkling notes. These resemble the familiar bell-notes that belong to the wood-thrush, cousin of the hermit and the dwarf hermit.

Not so numerous as its relatives, the wood-thrush is seen only in Eastern North America. It nests in trees or bushes, packing wet, decaying leaves and wood fiber into a paste, which dries and resembles the mud nest of the robin. It, too, gets its food in the litter of leaves and wet places, choosing fens and cranberry bogs in the pastures. All the thrushes delight in berries, and any berry-patch, wild or cultivated, is the bird's own patch of ground.

The sadder the day the sweeter the song of the wood-thrush. Nature-lovers who stroll into the thickest of the woods of a cloudy day on purpose to make the acquaintance of the thrush will find

"The heart unlocks its springs Wheresoe'er he singeth."

The notes of all the thrushes are singularly sweet, and may be recognized by their low, tinkling, bell-like tones.

At the funeral of Cock Robin, who did not survive his wedding-day in the legend, it was the thrush who sang a psalm, and he was well qualified, "as he sat in a bush," if such a thing were possible, no doubt bringing tears to his feathered audience.

The "throstle with his note so true" in the garden of Bottom, the fairy in "Midsummer Night's Dream," was the thrush of Shakespeare's own country. No fairy's garden is complete without this sweet singer described so truly by Emily Tolman.

"In the deep, solemn wood, at dawn I hear A voice serene and pure, now far, now near, Singing sweetly, singing slowly. Holy; oh, holy, holy; Again at evening hush, now near, now far-- Oh, tell me, art thou voice of bird or star? Sounding sweetly, sounding slowly. Holy; oh, holy, holy."