Friday, May 8, 2009

No Sweeter Sound

Every spring I swear I hear a wood thrush singing for one or two mornings, and then all I hear are hermit thrushes. So, I convince myself that the wood thrush was really a hermit thrush, perhaps rusty as it started singing for the new season. Well, this morning as I was coming down the walkway to work, I heard the lovely flutey music that could only be a wood thrush. I spent some time listening to it, trying to garner any small detail that I could so I could verify it inside with a recording. What stood out was the stuttering start to the ee-o-layyy. I rushed inside to the Thayer's Birding Software and queued up the wood thrush. There it was, the stuttering start (reminded me of the old Chia Pet ad: "ch-ch-ch-Chia") followed by that sweet sweet song. It's nice to know that all these years I was right: wood thrushes sing here before the hermits.

But that then brings the ponderable: what happens to them? Do they move on to better habitats, leaving just the hermits behind? I know that wood thrushes are in dire straits these last few years - populations in serious decline, mostly due to loss of habitat. They like woodlands near fields for nesting (I monitored a nest one year for Cornell's Lab of Orthinology's Citizen Science program), but their wintering grounds are under "attack" as well.

The world will be a sadder and quieter place without the song of the wood thrush.

2 comments:

  1. Yes, every year I wait for the return of the "woody" across the road from our place. It's always the very end of April or first week of May that it returns, and such a joy when it is heard once more. Lately however, all has been silent -- both morning and evening. If the silence continues much longer, I'm afraid of the worst...

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  2. How lucky to have both hermits and woods, both of them mighty sweet singers. Years and years ago when I lived in Ann Arbor MI we would observe hermit thrushes passing through on their way north. As they scratched in the leaves outside my window, I would hear them whisper their song, faint but unmistakedly the hermit thrush song, as if they were practicing up for when they reached their breeding grounds.

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