In some “Contributions to Ornithology,” by Dr. Richard Chamberlaine, published in the Companion to the Jamaica Almanack for 1842, this bird is described. The following observations are there quoted from a letter of Mr. Hill’s to the Doctor:—“I paid a visit the other day to the Highgate mountains, a district in which our native Ouzel, the Hopping Dick, is exceedingly abundant. On asking one morning the name of the bird, whose clear, mellow-toned whistle I was then listening to, a negro told me it was the _Hopping Dick_, and that they ‘always hear him when the long days begin.’ The long days had not yet begun; but at early dawn, while the distant horizon was seen but faintly gleaming through the dull grey break of daylight, and many of these Merles were gliding from one thicket to another, and dashing across the road with that bounding run from which they derive their sobriquet of Hopping Dick, one bird anticipated the season of song, by repeatedly sounding two or three cadences of that full deep whistle with which he salutes the lengthening year. “The forests skirting the mountain are his favourite haunt. If he frequents the open slopes and crests of the hills, he glides from tree to tree, just above the surface of the grass. If he rises above the lower branches of the pimento, or into some of the loftier shrubs, it is to visit the _Tillandsias_, or parasitical wild-pines, to drink from within the heart-leaves at those reservoirs of collected dews which are the only resource of the birds in these high mountains. His dark sooty plumage, his brilliant orange bill, and his habit, when surprised or disturbed, of escaping by running or flying low, and sounding all the while his alarm scream till he gets away into the thicket, completely identify him with the European Blackbird. “It was in the month of July, in 1834, that I first heard the song of this Ouzel, which I would call _Merula Saltator_, as this name preserves his distinctive sobriquet of Hopping Dick, and refers to his characteristic length of legs, both at the tarsus and the thighs. The shock of an earthquake had wakened all the living tenants of the plantation at which I was staying, when the voice of this bird, as the alarm lulled into silence, was heard from a small coppice of cedar-trees, clear and mellow. Though it was less varied than the song of the European Blackbird, it was very much like its tones when it is heard over distant fields in a summer’s morning. I had been apprised that I should hear it there, for it had sung in that grove daily at that season for three or four years; and though under the disadvantage of being an anticipated song, it was a very agreeable recognition of the melody of the European bird.