Mounting by easy flights to the top of
the tallest tree, he launches into the air with a sort of suspended,
hovering flight, like certain of the finches, and bursts into a
perfect ecstasy of song,--clear, ringing, copious, rivaling the
goldfinch's in vivacity, and the linnet's in melody. This strain is
one of the rarest bits of bird melody to be heard, and is oftenest
indulged in late in the afternoon or after sundown. Over the woods,
hid from view, the ecstatic singer warbles his finest strain. In this
song you instantly detect his relationship to the
water-wagtail,--erroneously called water-thrush,--whose song is
likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful
joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good
fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was
little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as
Thoreau by his mysterious night-warbler, which, by the way, I suspect
was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The
little bird himself seems disposed to keep the matter a secret, and
improves every opportunity to repeat before you his shrill,
accelerating lay, as if this were quite enough and all he laid claim
to.
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