It likes such clammy, silent neighbors, with their retiring habits and proper manners, for the reason that it is able to turn them to some account at meal-time, which, as is the case with most birds, is all the time, or any time. (It is said to resemble in habits and notes the English song-thrush, which is known to spend most of its time at certain periods of the year hunting snails, which it has learned to dress for eating by slapping them against a stone. It will choose a stone of the proper shape, to which it carries its snails as often as it has good luck in the hunt, leaving little heaps of shell by the stone to mark its picnic-ground.)
HERMIT THRUSH.
Family affairs bring little labor to a pair of hermits, for they have not far to go in search of nesting materials. They take what is close at hand, little dry twigs, lichens, and last year's leaves crumbled and moist, which soon lose their dampness and adhere together in a thick mass.
But few have found it, this nest of the hermit, hidden under the bushes where it is always shadowed, and where the fledglings may help themselves to rambling insects without so much as stepping out of the door. They are supposed to take advantage of this nearness to food by remaining about the nest later than most birds; or if they run, returning on foot of course, having tardy use of their wings, but learning to stretch their legs instead. And well may they learn to "stretch their legs," as they will come to their fortunes by "footing it" mostly, when they are not migrating on the wing.
Like the thrashers, the hermit must scratch for a living when berries are not ripe. By listening one may hear the bird at its work, and by slipping quietly in the dusk of the early morning to the lowlands, or the thick woods, and standing stock-still for a while, even see it. But nearly always it is under cover on the edge of thickets, where the leaf-mold is unstirred and richest. And always by its own self is the hermit, as if it loves nature better than the company of its fellows, listening now and then for underground or overhead sounds, and dwelling on the beauty of the leaf skeletons it overturns like a botanist.
Lace-work and dainty insertion in delicate threads does Madam Hermit find in her resorts—fabric so marvelous and fascinating she could admire it forever; cast-off finery of such insects as outgrow their clothes, grasshopper nymphs, and whole baskets full of locusts' eggs hidden in half-decayed logs, and making a nourishing breakfast, "rare done" and delicious. She delights in the haunts of the praying-mantis at egg-laying season, surprising the wonderful insect in her devotions, who scarcely has time to turn her head on her foe before she disappears from sight.
It is well for her thus to disappear suddenly, for she is spared witnessing the fate of her newly laid eggs just above her on the twig, their silken wrapper being no obstruction in the way of Madam Hermit finishing her meal on them.
These habits of the hermit-thrush mark the dwarf-hermit in southern California. We see it in the orange-groves after irrigation or during a wet winter. Plenty of mulching in the orchards invites the dwarf (where it is a hermit like its relative), and we find it scratching away in the litter, overturning frail little toadstool huts and umbrellas, and exchanging greetings with its neighbor, the varied thrush, under the next tree.