The Birds from T.H.R.U.S.H.

After many months' hiatus, I'm rededicating myself to updating posts on "That Bird Blog."

Those of you growing up in the 1960s will recognize my jokey reference to the TV show "The Man from UNCLE" (with Robert Vaughan), in which the bad guys worked for "T.H.R.U.S.H."

In this week's Lakeville Journal, I wrote about the veery, a common species of thrush found in our area. See the full column, below.

To round things out: there are five regularly occuring members of the thrush family in the Northwest Corner, plus three encountered only on migration. The five regularly occurring, in size order, are:

• American Robin: The largest and most familiar. A year-round resident, though some may migrate, and a prolific breeder. It's song is a well-known, melodic caroling (cheerily, cheer up! cheerily, cheer up!).
• Wood Thrush: The largest of our spotted forest thrushes, smaller than a robin, with warm brown upperparts, bright reddish-brown on the head and tail, and bold spots on the breast. Its beautiful song is a rich o-ee-o-ee-o-lay, the last note a kind of glassy trill. Strictly a summer breeder here.
• Hermit Thrush: Smaller than the wood thrush, with a rusty tail (but lacking the reddish-brown head) which it habitually pumps up and down. Its haunting song starts with a single flutelike note, each time on a different pitch, than breaks into a cascade of resonant tones and overtones. In our region, the hermit thrush nests at higher elevations; although most migrate, it is the only spotted thrush normally found here (in small numbers) in winter.
• Veery (see below).
• Eastern Bluebird: Yes, our beloved bluebird is a member of the thrush family. (Young bluebirds, like young robins, have spotting on the breast, betraying their kinship.) The smallest of our thrushes, bluebirds avoid the forests in favor of open fields and clearings. Many also spend the winter.

The three migrant species of spotted thrushes are the Swainson's Thrush, the Gray-cheeked Thrush (rare), and the Bicknell's Thrush (the rarest -- it breeds only on high elevation peeks in New York and New England). The Sibley or Peterson guides can help you learn how to identify these species.

Lakeville Journal "Nature's Notebook" -- July 13, 2006:

Although I grew up in New York City, my first encounter with nature in the Northwest Corner took place many years ago, when I was on summer break from college employed as a counselor at a sleep-away camp near Winsted (now long vanished). On my occasional evenings off, I would grab my binoculars and flashlight and head into the ample woods surrounding the camp. Other than a close encounter with a skunk, my most vivid memories of these walks are of listening to the sunset serenade of the veery.

The song of this small, tawny-colored thrush is one of the most beautiful birdsongs in nature. Many thrushes have lovely songs – just think of the melodious caroling of our area’s largest and most abundant thrush, the American robin – but the veery’s is especially mystical, a series of breathy, rolling flute-like notes descending the scale. One guide describes the sound as resonating as if the bird is “singing into a metal pipe.” The vocal apparatus of many thrushes allows them to produce more than one tone simultaneously, and this is true of the veery.

Veeries breed in moist forests with adequate understory or shrub cover for nesting. They prefer forests with some disturbance or regrowth to more mature forests, while at the same time favoring fairly large, unbroken areas of forest. For this reason, veeries may be an indicator of the quality of forest habitat in our region. They are long-distance migrants, most spending the winter in a small region of southern Brazil.

Small thrushes tend to be furtive, hewing to the shady forest floor, but a veery flying across the road can be recognized by its overall bright tawny coloration. Its cousins (hermit, wood, and Swainson’s thrushes) are more brown or reddish-brown by comparison.

Whenever I hear the evening concert of the veery, as I did the other night from a friend’s backyard in Sharon, I hark back to my Winsted woodland walks more than a quarter of a century ago. Whether out of nostalgia or not, I think of that song as one of the most characteristic and evocative songs of our Connecticut forests.