Until this little bird has arrived, I always feel as an audience do at a concert, before the chief singer has made her appearance, while the other performers are vainly endeavoring to soothe them by their inferior attempts.
This bird is more retiring than any other important singing-bird, except the Wood-Thrush,—being heard only in solitary groves, and usually in the vicinity of a pond or stream. Here, especially after sunset, he pours forth his brilliant and melancholy strains with a peculiar cadence, and fills the whole forest with sound. It seems as if the echoes were delimited with his notes, and took pleasure in passing them round with multiplied reverberations. I am confident this bird refrains from singing when others are the most vocal, from the pleasure he feels in listening either to his own notes, or to the melodious responses which others of his own kindred repeat in different parts of the wood. Hence he chooses the dusk of evening for his vocal hour, when the little chirping birds are mostly silent, that their voices may not interrupt his chant. At this hour, during a period of nine or ten weeks, he charms the evening with his strains, and often prolongs them in still weather till after dusk, and whispers them sweetly into the ear of night.
No bird of his size has more strength of voice; but his song, though loud, is modulated with such a sweet and flowing cadence, that it comes to the ear with all the mellowness of the softest warbling. It would be difficult to describe his song. It seems at first to be wanting in variety. I was long of this opinion, though I was puzzled to account for its pleasing and extraordinary effect on the mind of the listener. The song of the Veery consists of five distinct strains or bars. They might, perhaps, be represented on the musical staff, by commencing the first note on D above the staff and sliding down with a trill to C, one fifth below. The second, third, fourth, and fifth bars are repetitions of the first, except that each commences and ends a few tones lower than the preceding.
Were we to attempt to perform these notes with an instrument adapted to the purpose, we should probably fail, from the difficulty of imitating the peculiar trilling of the notes, and the liquid ventriloquial sounds at the conclusion of each strain. The whole is warbled in such a manner as to produce upon the ear the effect of harmony. It seems as if we heard two or three concordant notes at the same moment. I have never noticed this effect in the song of any other bird. I should judge that it might be produced by the rapid descent from the commencing note of each strain to the last note about a fourth or fifth below, the latter being heard simultaneously with the reverberation of the first note.
Another remarkable quality of the song is a union of brilliancy and plaintiveness. The first effect is produced by the commencing notes of each strain, which are sudden and on a high key; the second, by the graceful chromatic slide to the termination, which is inimitable and exceedingly solemn. I have sometimes thought that a part of the delightful influence of these notes might be attributable to the cloistered situations from which they were delivered. But I have occasionally heard them while the bird was singing from a tree in an open field, when they were equally pleasing and impressive. I am not peculiar in my admiration of this little songster. I have observed that people who are strangers to the woods, and to the notes of birds, are always attracted by the song of the Veery.
In my early days, when I was at school, I boarded in a house near a grove that was vocal with these Thrushes; and it was then I learned to love their song more than any other sound in Nature, and above the finest strains of artificial music. Since that time I have lived in town, apart from their sylvan retreats, which I have visited only during my hours of leisure; but I have seldom failed, each returning year, to make frequent visits to the wood to listen to their notes, which cause full half the pleasure
