I know this post is almost a week after the event of *Official* Mother's Day, but I was reading about the gray catbird, as we have a pair which frequents the feeders in our yard, and the verbal picture painted in the following, touched my heart.
...Incubation.--Mrs. Helen G. Whittle (1923) studied a pair of catbirds that built near her home in Peterboro, N. H. She writes:
The male took no share in incubating, nor did he ever, I think, make any attempt to brood the young. If he came to the nest and found the female absent, during incubation, he would fidget on a nearby twig in a helpless, worried fashion, but apparently never thought of taking her place. . . . During incubation, the male sang very infrequently within my hearing, and brought food to the female so seldom that I wondered how she could survive. There was however, evidence that the male of this pair was an inexperienced bird, possibly young, and this his first family.
The female, left to do all the incubating, was very faithful to her task and sat patiently day after day through an extremely rainy period, which continued with only brief respites, all through June and early July in southern New Hampshire. One afternoon there was a severe hailstorm, and the female on the nest with feathers drawn close, bill pointing straight up and eyes shut, made as good a watershed of herself as possible, while hailstones the size of large peas pelted her unmercifully.
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