shaped brown spots. Breast and under parts white. Bill dark above, lower mandible light. Feet light.
- Song:
- Ringing. echo-like. Professor Ridgway indicates it thus: “Taweel áh—taweel áh, twil-ah, twil-ah!”
- Season:
- Early May to October.
- Breeds:
- According to Cones, in the northerly part of its range, but it also breeds freely in our river groves and in the more southern portion of the Middle States.
- Nest:
- Built either upon or near the ground, of sticks and twigs like that of the Wood Thrush, but lacking the mud.
- Eggs:
- Like Robin and Wood Thrush, of a greenish blue. but smaller than either.
- Range:
- Eastern United States to the Plains, north to Manitoba, Ontario, Anticosti, and Newfoundland.
The Veery, the most slender and graceful of the Thrushes, is with us all the season, but it is so shy and elusive in its ways of slipping through the trees and underbrush in swampy woodlands that it seems scarcely an actual presence. Change a word in Wordsworth’s verses on the Cuckoo and the description is perfect:—
“O Veery shall I call thee bird,
Or but a wandering voice?”
When it first arrives, and before mating, the Veery is seen frequently in the garden, prying under dead leaves and in low bushes like all its insect-eating kin, but when it retires to the woods to nest all but the voice seems to vanish. That wonderful, haunting voice! It was a woodland mystery to me not so very long ago; a vocal Will-o’-the-Wisp. Leading on and on, up and down river banks, into wild grape tangles and clinging brush, then suddenly ceasing and leaving me to return as best I might.
There came a time, however, when a few pairs, mating before they left the garden in the spring, surprised us by singing while in view, and the same season we took a leisurely drive through the country to see the orchards in bloom, and stopped for the night at a hospitable farmhouse in a hollow that winds between banks clad with laurel and hemlocks up to the old village of Redding Ridge.
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