pine warblers. Flickers were shouting--or
laughing, if one pleased to hear it so--with true flickerish prolixity,
and a single downy woodpecker called sharply again and again. A
mocking-bird near me (there is _always_ a mocking-bird near you, in
Florida) added his voice for a time, but soon relapsed into silence. The
fact was characteristic; for, wherever I went, I found it true that the
mocker grew less musical as the place grew wilder. By instinct he is a
public performer, he demands an audience; and it is only in cities, like
St. Augustine and Tallahassee, that he is heard at his freest and best.
A loggerhead shrike--now close at my elbow, now farther away--was
practicing his extensive vocabulary with perseverance, if not with
enthusiasm. Like his relative the "great northern," though perhaps in a
less degree, the loggerhead is commonly at an extreme, either loquacious
or dumb; as if he could not let his moderation be known unto any man.
Sometimes I fancied him possessed with an insane ambition to match the
mocking-bird in song as well as in personal appearance. If so, it is not
surprising that he should be subject to fits of discouragement and
silence. Aiming at the sun, though a good and virtuous exercise, as we
have all heard, is apt to prove dispiriting to sensible marksmen. Crows
(fish crows, in all probability, but at the time I did not know it)
uttered strange, hoarse, flat-sounding caws. Everv bird of them must
have been born without a palate, it seemed to me. White-eyed chewinks
were at home in the dense palmetto scrub, whence they announced
themselves unmistakably by sharp whistles. Now and then one of them
mounted a leaf, and allowed me to see his pale yellow iris. Except for
this mark, recognizable almost as far as the bird could be distinguished
at all, he looked exactly like our common New England towhee. Somewhere
behind me was a kingfisher's rattle, and from a savanna in the same
direction came the songs of meadow larks; familiar, but with something
unfamiliar about them at the same time, unless my ears deceived me.

More interesting than any of the birds yet named, because more strictly
characteristic of the place, as well as more strictly new to me, were
the brown-headed nuthatches. I was on the watch for them: they were one
of the three novelties which I knew were to be found in the pine lands,
and nowhere else,--the other two being the red-cockaded woodpecker and
the pine-wood sparrow; and being th