Thanks to Steve and Fred Shaw and his informant for the additional light
cast on Boone's bird. We may have hit bottom on this, I dunno. One thing
we can probably eliminate is a small brown introduced songbird that had
been around in the wild for long enough to have produced any folklore.
A few early European settlers in Ohio may have brought birds with
them--maybe chickens, geese, etc. for household use--even though at the
time we're talking about the few households around had oodles of
turkeys, etc. for the taking. But only accidentally were they
introduced, and none of them was a small brown songbird as far as is known.
        By the middle of the nineteenth century some misguided city-dwellers
entertained the idea of importing and releasing some of the birds of
Europe. This foolishness persisted for many years, resulting in such
beloved freebooters as house sparrows and starlings and mute swans.
Ohio's small brown house sparrows, Lynds Jones wrote in 1903, were first
introduced in Cleveland, Warren, and Cincinnati in 1869. Birds were then
released in Marietta in 1870, Coshocton and Portsmouth in 1874,
Steubenville about 1880, and finally, just to make sure, in Wapakoneta
around 1882. Another small brown bird, the sky lark, had been
unsuccessfully released in Cincinnati and Columbus in the late '40s and
'50s; these less aggressive birds did not last long though, certainly
not long enough to invade the forests and prairies and inform a piece of
native folklore. If such a bird was around in 1778 in Ohio, it's hard to
imagine what it might have been.
        Maybe members of this list who hear an unusual bird sing, and then
suffer misfortune, can help build a database to support this hypothesis...
Bill Whan
Columbus

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