Hylocichla mustelina
Order Passeriformes
Family Turdidae
Adult.— Head and upper back, reddish-brown; lower back and tail brown; breast and sides of belly white, heavily spotted with large black spots.
Nest, generally in a sapling about eight feet up.
Eggs, greenish-blue.
The Wood Thrush is a common summer resident of southern New England and the Hudson Valley, but north of Massachusetts it is only found up the valleys of the Connecticut, the Merrimac, and their chief tributaries, and along Lake Champlain. It is true that it has been found at Willoughby Gap, and at Lake Memphremagog in Vermont, near Mt. Moosilauke, at Jefferson, and at Franconia in New Hampshire, but in most of the upland country of New England — in Worcester and Berkshire counties in Massachusetts, and farther north, wherever spruce and fir are found, in all of Maine but the extreme southwest, in the Adirondacks, and in nearly all of New Hampshire and Vermont. The Wood Thrush comes in early May, and is only occasionally seen after the first of September. In southern Connecticut and in the neighborhood of New York city it is a familiar dooryard bird, but in the rest of its northern range it is a bird of rich woods, especially where there is young growth near water.
The Wood Thrush is in song from the morning of its arrival till July, often all through the day, especially in cool woods, but more noticeably in late afternoon and early evening, when many other birds are silent. After the song ceases, one may still hear in the darkness a pip pip pip pip, which serves also as the alarm-note with which breeding birds greet an intruder. In August the Wood Thrush and the Veery become silent, and are seldom seen; they slip southward almost unnoticed.
This is the largest of our true brown thrushes. (The Brown Thrush, so-called, is the Thrasher; see Brown Thrasher) It is the most heavily spotted, not only on the breast, but also on the flanks; is tawny on the head and upper back, and olive-brown on the tail. For a suggestion of the difference between the song of this species and that of the Hermit Thrush.
Hoffmann – A Guide to the Birds of New England and Eastern New York (1904)