Sometimes one can pick them out; thus, on the borders of a marsh where
redshanks bred, I have heard the call of that bird distinctly given by
the thrush. And again, where the ring-ouzel is common, the thrush will
get its brief song exactly. When thrushes taken from the nest are reared
in towns, where they never hear the thrush or any other bird sing, they
are often exceedingly vocal, and utter a medley of sounds which are
sometimes distressing to the ear. I have heard many caged thrushes of
this kind in London, but the most remarkable instance I have met with
was at the little seaside town of Seaford. Here, in the main shopping
street, a caged thrush lived for years in a butcher's shop, and poured
out its song continuously, the most distressing throstle performance I
ever heard, composed of a medley of loud, shrill and harsh
sounds--imitations of screams and shouts, boy whistlers, saw filing,
knives sharpened on steels, and numerous other unclassifiable noises;
but all, more or less, painful. The whole street was filled with the
noise, and the owner used to boast that his caged thrush was the most
persistent as well as the loudest singer that had ever been heard. He
had no nerves, and was proud of it! On a recent visit to Seaford I
failed to hear the bird when walking about the town, and after two or
three days went into the shop to enquire about it. They told me it was
dead--that it had been dead over a year; also that many visitors to
Seaford had missed its song and had called at the shop to ask about the
bird. The strangest thing about its end, they said, was its suddenness.
The bird was singing its loudest one morning, and had been at it for
some time, filling the whole place with its noise, when suddenly, in the
middle of its song, it dropped down dead from its perch.

To drop dead while singing is not an unheard of, nor a very rare
occurrence in caged birds, and it probably happens, too, in birds living