It's the same every year. When July rolls around, I'm already tired of summer. I chaff under the monotonous rhythm of fog and sun with a few fogless days here and there, often too warm for comfort, before the fog rolls back in and I'm briefly grateful.
What I miss most is the early morning bird song. With the time past for defending territory or attracting a mate, there's no reason to sing. The Black-head Grosbeaks have stopped singing even at Jewel Lake in Tilden Park and soon the Swainson's Thrush, who starts singing later in the spring, will fall silent. Robins muster up enough energy to sing occasionally during the day or close to sunset, but they've long abandoned calling up the sun around dawn. So now these mornings, I wake to the metallic, repetitious Ôclink' of the California towhee -- "Old Faithful" I call him with his tenacious loyalty of my garden.
But just as I'm fantasizing about temporarily abandoning the Bay Area for more favorable climes, the Bewick's Wren begins singing and even an old grouch like me can't help but be cheered.
"Cheery" - that's what wrens are all about. Though I'm going to have to pay closer attention, I think our local Bewick's Wren is capable of belting out a stanza or two almost anytime of the year - or at the very least, a lusty scold.
For such an energetic, vociferous bird, they're hard to see, preferring to hide out in the neighborhood bushes, declining to sit on an uppermost branch even to deliver their sprightly overtures.
This mid-summer gratitude has got me to thinking and reading about wrens, along with remembering Ôwren moments.' Certainly the most memorable time was when several years ago, within a week of 9/11, I flew to Virginia to be with my dying sister. As a birder, she put me to shame, having over the years transformed her suburban Virginia Beach garden to a true bird sanctuary with pools fed by running water, shaded by native trees and bushes.
Taking a respite from the sadness within the house, I ventured out into her garden and was immediately greeted by a joyful song. I quickly located the singers - a pair of Carolina wrens - and I was able to return to her bedside with the good news - that all was well with her wrens.
My red-letter wren day was this April on a Mount Diablo Audubon field trip to Del Puerto Canyon - a four-wren day where we saw first the familiar Bewick's Wren and a House Wren. A Rock Wren popped up on top of a big boulder to rain down some sweet notes on us as we passed by. Along the creek, a pair of Canyon Wrens were busy with the business of procreation.
The Rock Wren was a new bird for me. But the Canyon Wren had led me on a winter morning chase around my son's garden in the Santa Barbara foothill garden, until I finally located and identified the owner of the bright call note. Later in the spring, when toiling up the steep track above Tunnel Road higher in the same mountains with my daughter, we heard the bird sing. "What is that!" she exclaimed. The lovely melody was rising up out of the canyon, now in late afternoon shade. I, also, was hearing the song for the first time, but I recognized it from listening to my bird cassettes while driving around - a habit that my grandsons find a bit peculiar (I tell them to think of it as 'bird rap').
I knew the Marsh Wren from trips to local marshes including Elsie Roemer's marsh in Alameda. Both Song Sparrows and Marsh Wrens share the limited space each spring, but the much shyer Marsh Wren rarely puts in an appearance.
The Winter Wren is the darkest and most diminutive of our local wrens. For two springs in row, the little singer poured out his ardor from the willows along the path to Jewel Lake. Naturalist Alan Kaplan said it was probably an unmated male. And though I don't wish unrequited love on any creature, I reveled in this song that went on and on for so many weeks. Once I had a fine, long look at the singer at Redwood Regional Park when he sat up on a log and treated us to a sustained song before dropping down into the leaf litter, where he spends most of his time, skulking about like a little mouse.
A four-inch dynamo with almost no tail, the Winter Wren is the only exception to wrens being exclusively a New World bird, having crossed the Bering Strait into Asia in some earlier time.
I was surprised to learn that most wrens are tropical birds with Mexico alone having 30 species. According to Kenn Kaufman in "Lives of North American Birds," their songs are especially well developed in the tropics where their vocalizations earn them names like Flutist Wren and Nightingale Wren.
Two of our wrens migrate - the House Wren and the Rock Wren - while the little Winter Wren, our neighborhood Bewick's Wren, and the Canyon Wren more or less stay put.
Like Berkeley's Amelia Sanford Allen, whose book "Chasing Wrens" published posthumously in 1945 by her husband, I, too, hope to be 'chasing wrens' for a few more years at least.
-- Phila Rogers, July 10, 2006