In the most diverse sorts of birds, even barnyard foul, one sometimes catches a mannerism or appearance of the reptilian. This is especially true of the spotted thrushes, which will at times assume attitudes of motionless alertness remindful of lizards, with which they share a distant common ancestor. Of course they are not really like lizards, but one gets a touch of it occasionally, not only in these attitudes but also in a peculiar appearance or _expression_ about the base of the bill and the eyes. It is such a humorless _expression_ as to be laughable on occasion. You see the same thing in the robin, close to, when he holds up his head intent to catch a sound – something primitive and stolid, even harsh, in the _expression_ of the face. Above – that is, on the head, back, wings, and upper side of the tail – this genus varies from olive-brown to a richer rusty or cinnamon brown. Underneath it is spotted, darkly in the wood thrush, in the veery only faintly on the throat and upper breast. The tail is quite short and the legs are long, as befits birds that hunt their living on uneven ground. But I have never seen the spotted thrushes scratch, like towhees and fox sparrows. They turn the leaves over, in their foraging, with a quick toss of the bill. In all the woods of North America there are no singers to compare with these spotted thrushes. The mockingbird, which shuns the woods, compares in technical brilliance, but he does not have a song in the sense that these do. He specializes in notes and variations, in the production of striking and beautiful single tones or phrases, but lacks melody. He arouses delight and astonishment, but the singing of the wood thrush and the hermit thrush and the veery evokes wonder. It is hard to associate it with the mundane world. When one listens to their songs with an attentive spirit, at twilight from the depths of the forest, it seems at times as if one heard something more than a singing bird. This is especially true of the veery, which is a less brilliant singer than either the wood or the hermit thrush, but unearthly.… The hermit thrush is the only one of the spotted thrushes that winters in the United States. The others spend the winter in Central and South America, the olive-back as far south as Argentina. It is strange that birds of such sheltered habitat should launch themselves overseas twice a year – flying close to the waves, I imagine, so that from a ship at sea the traveler might catch an occasional glimpse of a brown speck fluttering in the trough – and yet survive. Even wood thrushes, boldest of all in our parts, are easily confused and sometimes lose their heads altogether when they find themselves out in the open, away from the shelter of their native trees.… The song of the veery is a soft and continuous swirling sound that gives the impression of spiraling downward. Commentators are at variance over how it should be rated, and understandably so, for it is not comparable to the song of any other bird. It is not brilliant or spectacular, or notable for range and variety – these being the qualities that are usually dwelt on in thinking of birds as rivaling each other in song. This voice is merely uncanny and unearthly. It has a soft, reedy double tone, such as might conceivably be produced by a violinist drawing his bow across two strings at once; but no mechanical instrument could produce such thin, resonant chords. It has also a windy quality, and perhaps one could give an idea of it by comparing it to the sound produced by blowing across the top of a bottle. The overtone, the resonance, as if the bird carried its own echo within itself, might make one think that the song was actually issuing from inside a bottle. It is a soft, tremulous, utterly ethereal sound, swirling downward and ending, swirling downward and ending again. Heard in the gloom of twilight, back and forth across the marshes, it gives the impression that this is no bird at all but some spirit not to be discovered.… When, in the early winter of 1941–42, I moved to the city of Washington, one of my few regrets was that I should be residing too far south to hear the song of the veery when spring came. Veeries do not breed south of central New Jersey, except in the mountains, and they do not sing except on their breeding grounds. Although my time in Washington was almost wholly occupied with other matters, I did not have to give up my pursuit of birds entirely, for I made it a habit to walk to work every morning through such a lovely bit of woodland as you would not look for in any city park. I had between a mile and two miles of this woodland to traverse, and it contained a greater density and variety of birds than you could find in most of the surrounding country. Even barred owls and black-crowned night herons and broad-winged hawks were present.… On the night of May 20 it rained heavily, clearing at dawn. The woods were still absorbing the night’s rain when I walked down in the morning. The sun was just about to make itself felt. Its rays showed against a woodland mist that remained as an aftermath of the rain, leaving patches and sparkles of light at odd intervals. The world, still so fresh and moist, seemed as though it had just emerged from the chrysalis of an age-old darkness. At one point a small tributary stream tumbles through a ravine to enter the main creek. Back up the ravine the woods are dense and rise steeply on either hand. It is a place of big trees, many beeches with gnarled roots, tall tulip trees, sycamores, and ponderous oaks, all interlaced above so that you see only bits of sky. A soft golden light suffuses the scene. Although I had passed the entrance to this ravine every morning, I had never entered it. This morning, however, something made me pause in front of it. An Acadian flycatcher was uttering its explosive call at intervals, a pewee was voicing its long-drawn sorrow, and I could hear the perky buzzing of a parula warbler directly overhead. When I listened I could hear many other songs and calls farther off. Something, however, had brought the veery to my mind. I waited a moment, listening intently, heard nothing out of the way, and started forward again. I had to stop a second time. Again, some vibration amid all these voices had put me in mind of a veery. And each time I started forward the impression returned. At last I entered the ravine to investigate. No sooner had I entered than all doubt vanished. Faint but clear, against the murmuring and buzzing of the woods and the roar of water, it came, the swirling, swirling, tremulous spiral of tone, over and over again. I found the delicate bird at the head of the ravine, singing in the forest mist, amid the long rays of golden light. He was moving from branch to branch, raising his head at intervals and opening his bill to release that lovely series of interweaving and falling phrases.… At the end of a week it had become apparent that the veery had taken up his territory far outside the normal breeding range of his species. On June 1, in the morning, I found two veeries singing on the slopes of the ravine. My veery sang and was answered from close by, again and again. The second song, however, did not have the same quality as the first. It was rapid and perfunctory, lacking the full resonance. Hereafter there were three of us who observed the veeries from day to day, wondering whether we dared hope that they were a true pair and would stay to breed in Washington, so far from their native ground.… On the 26th, again, I found a veery carrying a caterpillar in its bill, not swallowing it, but retaining it in its bill while it continued to forage among the dead leaves. Then it flew off through the woods and I lost it. I said nothing of this to the others, but the following Sunday morning I put on old clothes and set off, determined to find out if the veeries were nesting or to assure myself that they were not. I was almost three hours about the business. At long intervals I would come upon one or the other of the pair in some part of the woods, hunting food, sometimes swallowing it, sometimes carrying it in its bill. Always it flew off through the woods and I lost it. I could find no center or focal point of activity. The pair seemed to be ranging the woods indiscriminately and aloof from each other. For their part, the veeries paid no attention to me. They showed no curiosity or alarm, even when I squeaked with my lips in imitation of ravished nestlings. Those squeaks would sometimes set the woods to ringing with alarm all about me. The wood thrushes would shout at me, the catbirds came mewing, the towhees drag their wings on the ground at my feet; Carolina wrens and house wrens would chatter angrily, even the warblers and titmice would come down from the treetops to see what it was all about. But the veeries remained heedless, and I took this for a sign that they were not nesting and consequently did not share the common motive for alarm. I had actually given up the hunt and was on my way out of the woods when my eye was again caught by one of the veeries. It had a caterpillar in its bill and was uttering its almost inaudible single note, the faint whew. It flew toward some shrubbery on the slope, disappeared, returned without the caterpillar, and hopped in its peculiar bounding way among the dead leaves near the path, searching for another morsel. It found another, flew straight to a low branch, and remained there, watching me, uttering its plaintive note repeatedly. It flew to another branch, waited a moment, still eyeing me, then dropped to a low tangle of vine-clad shrubbery. I fixed it in my binoculars. The veery was standing on top of the vine, in the open. As I studied it I noticed a stirring at its feet, there among the vine leaves. The bird dipped its head, then flew. An instant later I was looking straight down upon three half-fledged nestlings in an open cup among the leaves. The sensation that filled me at that moment could not have been more overpowering if I had stepped through the shrubbery to find the end of the rainbow. —Louis J. Halle Talleyrand is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Talleyrand that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments. |