Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE SPARROW-LIKE BIRDS

THE SONG BIRDS

THE THRUSHES

Ground Thrushes

Perhaps most closely related to the last is a group of some half a dozen genera and upward of fifty species known as Ground Thrushes, which are characterized by having the sexes usually different and the under surface of the wing with a well-defined pattern of white. They are mainly sedentary and especially ground-haunting in their habits, having short, rounded wings and strong legs and feet. Being abundantly represented in Africa, southern Asia, and the large islands to the southward, they are the only members of the subfamily present in Australia and New Zealand, the former possessing four and the latter two species. The only species we may mention is the Siberian Ground Thrush {Geocichla sihirica), a bird about nine inches long, the male being slaty gray with a broad stripe of white over the eye and down the abdomen, and the female olive-brown above and buffish white below. After spending the summer in central and eastern Siberia, they retire to China, the Burmese provinces, and Java and Sumatra in winter. They frequent the ground in damp, wooded localities, feeding on worms, insects, and snails, and construct a rather rough nest of grasses, scantily walled with mud and lined with dry grass; it is usually placed in the fork of a tree near the ground, and the complement of four to six eggs are grayish or sometimes blue-green, finely spotted with reddish. A single species, known as the Varied Thrush (Ixoreus navia), of extreme western North America, is the only representation of the group in the New World.
Coming now to a group in which, in addition to a marked structural distinction, the sexes are practically similar in plumage and the throat, breast, or flanks more or less spotted at all ages, the common Missel Thrush may be taken as typical of the genus Turdus. The Missel, or Mistletoe Thrush (Turdus visci-vorus), of the Old World, which takes its name from its excessive fondness for the berries of the mistletoe, has habits quite similar to those of the American Robin just described. It is larger than the Robin, attaining a length of twelve inches, its color being grayish brown above and buffy white boldly spotted with blackish below. It ranges throughout northern and central Europe and eastern Asia, breeding at the north and wintering partially in the more southern districts, being for example particularly abundant in the British Islands, where it has greatly increased in recent years and where it frequents woods, orchards, parks, and gardens the year round.

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