More or Less?

As nature columnist for the Journal, I receive a steady stream of e-mails from readers with interesting observations. The great majority of these communications can be grouped into one of two categories: (1) “I’ve seen so many of [creature X] this year. They seem to be everywhere. Why?” or (2) “Where have all the [creature Y] gone this year? I haven’t seen one in weeks.”

What these questions have in common is…they are very difficult to answer! What I try to explain is that the observations of a casual observer – even my own – are subject to a great many variables. In any day, week, month, or year we may be more or less attentive to a particular critter or natural phenomenon than at another time. Short-term weather cycles or the type of activity animals engage in (such as nesting, feeding, resting) may account for them being more or less evident during a particular period. Presence or absence may even be very localized. This seemed to be the case recently when one reader in Salisbury told me he hadn’t seen any robins in weeks. Funny, I thought I’d been seeing them with great frequency in Sharon! Could there be a reason why they’re not hanging out in a Salisbury yard? Perhaps, but it’s impossible to say.

The point is this: It’s one thing – human nature, I suppose – to have the impression of relative abundance or paucity (and I don’t mean to discourage observations, or e-mails). It’s another thing, however, to translate these into actual population trends, as we are often tempted to do. For one thing, human memory is notoriously unreliable. More important, scientists spend many years developing methodologies for surveying species, and only through this slow, steady accumulation of data do we know, for example, that robins are doing quite well, thank you, but that many other species of songbirds, such as the lovely wood thrush (a cousin to the robin), have experienced serious declines in their populations over the past half-century.

Again, such declines may not be obvious to us. I’m still graced by the song of the wood thrush in my backyard and other local woodlots. But they are no less real – and this is where our focus should be: on understanding and supporting efforts to mitigate the causes for these real population declines.

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.