siren thrushes

All things that grow are, this time of year, sending their energy upwards, outwards – to grow, to fruit, to leaf, to disperse… This includes myself, and I find the majority of my time is spent in simple absorption and observation, rather than reflection and synthesis. That, and my there is so much to do! The tomato plants are in, albeit a few days before the ordained date of May twenty-first, the official ‘post-frost’ day in New England. Today we sow kale and more lettuce, along with peas, as the first crop has been thoroughly nibbled. Needless to say, we also have to build a fence.

But I still have the early mornings, and they are for birds. This morning, specifically, was for thrushes. They are the sirens of the woods, and I have been drawn in to no avail countless times. They dwell in the woods, and are for the most part dull and rusty colored, and as such evade viewing nine times out of ten. Ten out of ten for me – I’ve never seen a hermit thrush, a wood thrush, or even a veery. They might be like an avian Echo, for all I know, made up entirely of haunting, ethereal sound. Their voices are so extraordinary they don’t need anything else of note – one might think with voices as enchanting they’d have to be dressed to the nines, with foot-long plumes and scarlet eggs or some such thing. But that would be altogether too much. Leave the colors to the warbler who sounds like a squeaky wheel.

Sometimes you’ll hear the thrushes without having to venture off your path – wood thrushes can be heard along roadsides, and I’ve heard veeries in more open wet places. Apparently hermit thrushes will come to trails in the woods, but I’ve never seen one there. You can hear them a long ways off, but I’ve found I have to get deeper into the woods to be really surrounded by their song.

This morning I was the luckiest I’ve been listening to thrushes. I sat on an old stump in a typical New England forest, beeches wrapped around old barbed wire, clearings here and there from logged white pines, low blueberries growing up in the openings… One can’t just go searching for the thrushes – they’re sirens, recall. You don’t need to strap yourself to a mast, or stump, but you do have to sit, and simply let them sing. As I settled down the thrushes started up, first the veery to my left, all fluted waterfall. The two words you’ll hear in any description of thrush song are ‘flute-like’ and ‘ethereal.’ Both are true, but they’re a bit vague. The veery is four downward spiraling trills, the first two starting higher than the last two. All thrushes sound like wind chimes, multi-toned and metallic, but the veery adds a lovely courseness, and almost an urgency. Imagine those carved wood frog instruments – when you rake their back it sounds like a frog’s trill. Add that to a wind chime, and you’ve got the veery.

Then I heard the wood thrush, or three, coming from a bit deeper in the woods. They sound like a wind chime giggling, though I’m told you can listen for the definitive ‘ee-o-lay!” pattern within their rather tripping call. Finally came the hermit thrush, the first I’ve heard this year. I’m surprised – I thought I’d have to go a bit farther north to hear her in the summer (they winter in the Carolinas). I’m thrilled, too, because their call is undoubtedly my favorite. How do you possibly describe it? It might as well be the eternal voice of the Woods herself. It is not urgent, or hurried, or really even playful. It is better described as plaintive, though melancholy is more apt.  A long introductory note, the flute, and then trace the chimes with your hand, but slowly. Mournful? Not quite, it’s not the loon or the mourning dove. It’s more restful than that, and it doesn’t ask a question. It is expressive, not seeking. And the magic therein is that when you really, really listen to a hermit thrush’s song, she has induced that very spirit in you.

It’s hard to hold on to that expressive stillness, with peas to be planted and errands to be run. But the thrushes will hold it for us, and we can return to the woods again another morning.

on robins

 The mere sight of an American robin isn’t the first sign of spring, although the Audubon here in Massachusetts gets calls all winter reporting errant and harbinger robins. Many individuals do over-winter, changing to a diet of berries instead of worms and moving deeper into the forest. But all the particulars change in the spring, and they become my backdrop – something so simple and clear and honest it’s always already happening before I realize it. I have moved into spring, already, and I stop in my tracks and realize the evening robins have brought me there.

Their plumage changes in the spring, like many birds. But it’s a bit subtler than the noticeable brightening and blackening of the goldfinch: the bill brightens to sunflower yellow and the red breast gets deeper and ruddier. They get a bit of flash, especially when combined with the two outer white patches visible on their tails as they streak away from lawns with their woodpecker-esque trumpeting. They wear white-ringed monocles, and their dapper gray backs and long thrush tails make them appear as though they’ve put on their morning suits, all three pieces with a cheeky red vest.

We see them now on lawns, pulling worms from wet earth. They seem to me always clumsily avoiding some kind of amusing mishap, because yes, they hop like most birds, but they also kind of run. They actually scamper about. I haven’t been able to find much research or basic information on songbirds who seem to run around, but it seems to me it makes sense for a larger songbird who spends a good deal of time on the ground. Hopping takes a heck of a lot more energy than speed-walking. Try it.

So T. migratorius is a sight for the eyes, but more profoundly he is a wake-up call for our inner ears. Their song is a somewhat clumsy, liquid four-part question, to me. You’ll see it written as ‘cheerio, cheerily, cheerio, cheerily.’ It is most definitely thrush – there is a depth and clarity to it, though nothing like its cousins the hermit or veery. It’s not long and impressive, like the operatic song sparrow, or multi-toned like the boreal thrushes. It’s not absolutely unmistakable like, say, the towhee (‘drink your tea!’), as the gray catbird can sound like a robin, perhaps after a bit of champagne. But nobody sings you into twilight like the robin. They are quintessentially crepuscular, singing loudest before dawn and after dusk. They’ll sing when almost all the light is gone from the sky, and it’s the cheeriest sound I know. It’s the activity gentle but bright enough to offer allowance that our own can stop. Someone has taken the reigns for the day, and off we can drift. 

Their evening song is taps, for me, but not the sort that brings tears. It’s the taps we sang at camp – “day is done, gone the sun…” Reverence with the corners of one’s lips turned up, no great heartbreak, just rest. And a bit of a chuckle, because they are pretty silly.