Thinking of Thrushes

The winter of 2006/07 may well go down as the year of the Varied Thrush. Each winter these lovely birds that nest in the coastal rainforest of the Pacific Northwest arrive in our Bay Area gardens in October. In the early morning hours especially on a cool, damp morning you may hear their haunting song ≠ eerie, sustained notes issued on several pitches that the more literal-minded among us describe as the sound of steam escaping from pipes. Seldom abundant, Varied Thrushes are always shy and elusive.

But this year they are everywhere. Three hundred were counted during the annual Christmas count in Tilden Park alone. Perhaps emboldened by their numbers, they join the common winter sparrows at garden feeders, or leave sheltering shrubs to feed on open lawns.

I can usually count on seeing one on my afternoon walks in my Berkeley Hills neighborhood. I'm alerted to its presence by that eerie call. And though I seldom see one fully revealed, I'll watch as the bird leaves the ground to slip silently up into a shrub or tree where I've come to recognize the slim dark profile with the head tilted slightly upwards

No one seems to know what explains their extraordinary numbers this year: A bumper crop of fledglings during their breeding season? An unusually heavy berry or acorn crop here where they winter?

The Varied Thrush was no stranger to me as during my childhood one sat on my bookshelf -- a purchase from a local taxidermy studio by my parents in support of my budding interest in birds. Over the years, dust dulled its feathers and finally the thrush, and my moldering nest and egg collection, disappeared. Only my binoculars and field guide books followed me from place to place.

I've always favored thrushes. Inviting yet another case of poison oak as a child, I crept through the underbrush growing along creek across from my house. I was in pursuit of a glorious song coming from an invisible singer. Peering through the dense vegetation, I spied a brown bird with a speckled breast fixing me with its round eye made even more intent by the pale eye ring. Thumbing through my 1930s Peterson "Field Guide to Western Birds." I gave my singer a name -- Olive-backed Thrush (later renamed Swainson's Thrush).

This was our summer thrush in the Oakland Hills where I grew up in the years before robins commonly nested in the Bay Area. Now I go to nearby Tilden Park to hear my childhood singer who nests along Wildcat Creek. In especially popular spots you might hear several singers performing a kind of round of ascending phrases. They sing well into the summer long after the other creek side singers like the Warbling Vireo and the Black-headed Grosbeak no longer, or seldom, sing. On late summer walks I hear their querulous call note, slightly inflected at the end like a question posed.

Last fall, I saw both thrushes in the park at once -- a lingering Swainson's Thrush and a early-arrived Hermit Thrush with its russet tail.

I can count on at least one Hermit Thrush in my garden all winter. In mid-April, shortly before its departure, the Hermit Thrush begins rehearsing the song for its summer in the High Sierra -- a soto-voiced rendition of those ethereal spiraling melodies that have given me the encouragement to continue laboring up a steep mountain canyon as I sweated under a heavy pack. When I've heard the singers at dusk in shadowy mountain recesses, tears filled my eyes with a kind of aching longing for the unimagined. Poets, struggling to find words adequate to describe the song, often resort to religious metaphors.

A few winters ago, I was grieved to find a dead Hermit Thrush in front of my front door. A simple burial in my flower bed with a coverlet of leaves and soil didn't seem adequate so I tried my hand at writing a poem in tribute.

Hermit Thrush

I found him lying on my doorstep

Breast still luminous

A speck of blood on his beak

The round eye drained of sight.

A glass door reflecting sky and trees

Had offered false passage.

In March, when those of his kind respond to hormonal urgings

Spurred by the lengthening day,

He will lie beneath oak leaves

Flesh feeding others, until only feather and bone remain.

And when day equals night,

And rising sap heats the willows along Sierra streams

Those wiser, or luckier, than he

Will leave the gardens by the sea.

.

No thoughts of thrushes can conclude without giving the common American Robin its proper due. While Varied and Swainson's Thrushes are shy and often secretive with Hermit Thrushes somewhat bolder, the robin is downright brazen, even at times an exhibitionist. A toothsome crop of berries fills him with reckless abandon. And when nesting season arrives, any robin worth his worm is apt to find the highest, most open, perch for his territorial declarations.

The robin is one of those fortunate species which has thrived in the settled America of farms and suburban where cleared land offers pastures and gardens. In the best of the American democratic tradition, the robin is a true equalitarian, building nests and singing in the richest precincts or in the most modest neighborhoods.

Wherever the robin nests, he is the first singer of the day beginning his "cheery-ups" even before dawn shows itself on the eastern horizon. I like to think that the robin sings up the sun.

Though the robin is a denizen of the most settled places, it appears equally at home in the wilder places. I remember the robins caroling in the icy pre-dawn at 9000 feet in Tuolumne Meadows. And once many years ago while spending Easter in Oaxaca, Mexico, several of us hired a driver to take us over near-impassable roads into the higher mountains where the guide promised special birds. He delivered us to an alpine meadow full of singing robins.

Now in late January with yellow acacias and oxalis in bloom and flocks of robins and Cedar Waxwings plundering the last of the cotoneaster berries, the time for robin pairing is at hand. I will soon begin my day with robin song.

-Phila Rogers