It is an exceedingly
beautiful effect, and so far as I know unique among birds that have
the habit of singing in large companies.
I remember that we had a carpenter in those days, an Englishman named
John, a native of Cumberland, who used to make us laugh at his slow
heavy way when, after asking him some simple question, we had to wait
until he put down his tools and stared at us for about twenty seconds
before replying. One of my elder brothers had dubbed him the
"Cumberland boor." I remember one day on going to listen to the choir
of finches in the blossoming orchard, I was surprised to see John
standing near the trees doing nothing, and as I came up to him he
turned towards me with a look which astonished me on his dull old
face--that look which perhaps one of my readers has by chance seen on
the face of a religious mystic in a moment of exaltation. "Those
little birds! I never heard anything like it!" he exclaimed, then
trudged off to his work. Like most Englishmen, he had, no doubt, a
vein of poetic feeling hidden away somewhere in his soul.
We also had the other kind of concert-singing by another species in
the plantation. This was the common purple cow-bird, one of the
Troupial family, exclusively American, but supposed to have affinities
with the starlings of the Old World.
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