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“The wood thrush as I know it seems to love civilization; he doubtless finds his favorite food more abundant in the vicinity of our dwellings. His cousins, the hermit and veery thrushes, prefer the dense, remote woods, and doubtless for the same reason. The wood thrush's brighter coat seems more in keeping with the open glades and groves than with the denser woods.”
“Then he took out the bird-book, settled comfortably on a bench, and with a deep sigh of satisfaction turned to the section headed ‘V.’ Past ‘veery’ and ‘vireo’ he went, down the line until his finger, trembling with eagerness, stopped at ‘vulture.’ ”
“[Alexander]WILSON proposed to become the biographer of all the birds of America. Governor Tompkins of New York told him that so far from paying $120 for a book about birds he would not give a hundred for all the birds in the country, if he had ’em alive! In Charleston Wilson wandered the streets looking for houses that would suggest that their owners might be persons of enough wealth and cultivation to subscribe to his book.—Clifton Fadiman
Up to his time nothing appreciable on American birds existed in writing, except some lists drawn up by Jefferson, Barton and Bartram, and some descriptions by Mark Catesby. When Wilson’s volume containing the biographies of the hummingbird, catbird, mockingbird and kingbird appeared, he was—startling as it now seems—telling the world of science the first it had heard of them. If Wilson was no artist, if he lacked Audubon’s power of dramatizing and englamoring each encounter with a new species, the little schoolmaster (“who didn’t whip enough,” as the parents complained) was at least a peerless observer, cautious, exact, conscientious, methodical—virtues, every one of them, which Audubon exhibited only exceptionally. Nature had not endowed him with the brush of an Audubon, yet he made a draughtsman of himself by dint of perseverance.
Whenever I hear the sweet, swinging vree-hu, vree-heee of the veery, called Wilson’s thrush, I think of the lonely little weaver, the first bird lover to penetrate the desolate swamps, with only a little parrot on his shoulder for company.
“This morning early the veery, to my unbounded delight and surprise, came and sang in the pear tree in the garden. Of course it was for my benefit. I thought first it was one of those independent, irresponsible tricks of the imagination, as it was very early and raining, and as he did not sing fully and confidently. It was like a dream of my boyhood. There was also a burst of bobolink melody from somewhere in the air—a troop going North, I expect.”
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