Tag Archives: brown thrasher

LOON SONG

THEY SAY SPRING ADVANCES fifteen miles a day, about the pace of a steady walk, which explains why I could experience three springs that year. The first was in March, in Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay, where I stayed in a small cabin near the bay to watch new grass sprouting in farmers’ fields and the broad-winged hawks that congregate in kettles high overhead. I counted a couple hundred broad-wings one day, which I thought was spectacular, but a local birder said they sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands—entire galaxies of spiral formations spinning slowly northward with the wind. In the marshes and woodlots were other early migrants: red-winged blackbirds, yellow-rumped warblers, ruby- and golden-crowned kinglets, and a brown thrasher that perched on the topmost branch of a tree beside my cabin one morning and performed tireless variations on the theme of “Here I am, look at me!”

Three weeks later, as I drove home, those same birds were showing up 300 miles north, in the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. The snow had finally left our yard and the woods out back, and forsythia and trillium were starting to blossom. Suddenly trout were feeding on mayflies in the rivers, morels were popping beneath the aspens, and butter-butts and kinglets were flitting among the bare branches of the trees.

Then it was time for the third spring, so I drove north again, crossed the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula, and followed a network of gravel roads until I banged up against the shore of Superior. I had the key to a friend’s cabin, but I had to shovel the snow away before I could reach the door. The ice was off the big lake—it was brilliant blue water to the horizon—but stranded on the beach were remnant icebergs spangled with sand. I looked up and saw two dozen broad-winged hawks circling high overhead, waiting for a south wind to carry them across the lake to Ontario.

Spring is the most complicated season. It arrives pulling a clanging train of machinery, and we realize that the name we’ve given it is all wrong. It doesn’t spring, it saunters—two steps forward, one back—and often it retreats like a child in a sulk and we have to wait a few days or a week before it returns.

One morning I stepped from my friend’s cabin on Lake Superior and was met by the first warm wind of the season. A familiar call sounded high overhead and I looked up to see a loon hurtling past, bound for Canada. Then came another, and another, each trailing its ululating warble.

It was the clarion announcement, the emblem of the wild north, a song that stirs primordial urges in many of us who cherish unspoiled places. It’s the music of mist-shrouded lakes deep in the spruce forest, a boreal timelessness that is perhaps best heard from a canoe. Coming from the sky above Superior it was this and more: the sound of wildness in transit, winging north with the lengthening days of this season of hope.

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LIQUID RUNS OF MELODY

If you’re like me, not even the recent spell of cold and snow can push away the stirrings of spring fever. My symptoms always include greater than usual obsessions with birds and fish and morel mushrooms. Today it’s mostly birds.

With that in mind, maybe it’s a good time to revisit a couple of my early blog posts about bird songs and our efforts to render them phonetically and as musical scores:

I WAS AWAKENED EARLY THIS MORNING by a northern cardinal and a tufted titmouse singing in the walnut tree outside my window. And I could hear also, in a kind of counterpoint to those bright and piercing notes, the tap-tap-tap of dripping eaves. Is it possible? Are rumors of spring true?

art by Glenn Wolff, from A Walk in the Animal Kingdom

Birdsong has probably inspired more poetry and music than any event in nature. How we interpret those songs makes up a tiny but vigorous sub-genre of literature that can sometimes be as entertaining as the songs themselves. [Songs of the northern cardinal can be heard here] [Listen to a tufted titmouse here]

Thoreau’s journals are filled with examples. He writes that the wood thrush’s “cool bars of melody” make him think of “…the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs.”

For John James Audubon, the same bird’s song recalls “… the emotions of the lover, who at one moment exults in the hope of possessing the object of his affections, and the next pauses in suspense…” [To hear the song of a wood thrush, go here]

The hermit thrush, says John Burroughs, “…suggests a serene religious beatitude as no other sound in nature… ‘O spheral, spheral!’… ‘O holy, holy! O clear away, clear away! O clear up, clear up!’ interspersed with the finest trills and the most delicate preludes. It … seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains in his best moments.”

Another thrush (what kind he doesn’t say) inspired Lewis Thomas to write: “The thrush in my backyard sings down his nose in meditative liquid runs of melody, over and over again, and I have the strongest impression that he does this for his own pleasure. Some of the time he seems to be practicing, like a virtuoso in his apartment. He starts a run, reaches a midpoint in the second bar where there should be a set of complex harmonics, stops, and goes back to begin over, dissatisfied… It is a meditative, questioning kind of music, and I cannot believe that he is simply saying, ‘thrush here.’” [Listen to a hermit thrush here]

Here is John Muir on the song of the American dipper (he called it the Water Ouzel): “…his mellow, fluty voice is ever tuned to downright gladness…his music is that of the streams refined and spiritualized. The deep booming notes of the falls are in it, the trills of rapids, the gurgling of margin eddies, the low whispering of level reaches, and the sweet tinkle of separate drops oozing from the ends of mosses and falling into tranquil pools.”

And Theodora Stanwell-Fletcher on the same bird:“…a burst of rippling notes… a clear, sweet song… In vivid moonlight we could see them… dipping and bobbing on rocks in the cold shining water – and singing. Their song echoed back and forth so that all the lake was ringing with it. When we went inside again the birds flew above our roof and poured their music down on us… those crystal tinkles, which matched so perfectly the icy purity of the winter night.” [For the song of the American dipper, go here]

Roger Tory Peterson on the song of another Western species, the canyon wren: “A gushing cadence of clear, curved notes tripping down a scale…” [Songs of the canyon wren can be heard here]

Donald Culross Peattie on the song of the white-throated sparrow: “…the white-throat’s touching chromatic pierces the heart; it blends sadness and happiness… a song like a cry, a song that speaks of the antiquity of time, the briefness of life.”

[To hear the "Old Sam Peabody, Peabody" call of the white-throated sparrow, go here]

Izaac Walton, on the nightingale: “…which breathes such sweet loud music out of her little instrumental throat that it might make mankind to think miracles are not ceased. He that at midnight…should hear, as I have very often, the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth and say, ‘Lord, what music hast Thou provided for the saints in heaven, when Thou affordest bad men such music on earth.’”

D.H. Lawrence, also on the nightingale: “A kind of brilliant calling and interweaving of glittering exclamation such as must have been heard on the first day of creation, when the angels suddenly found themselves created, and shouting aloud before they knew it. Then there must have been a to-do of angels in the thickets of heaven: ‘Hello! Hello! Behold! Behold! Behold! It is I! It is I! What a mar-mar-marvelous occurrence! What!”

Thoreau again, on the exquisite song of the tiny winter wren: “It was surprising for its steady and uninterrupted flow… It reminded me of a fine corkscrew stream issuing with incessant lisping tinkle from a cork, flowing rapidly.” [The winter wren's song is here]

My friend Mary Ann Linsell tells me she has always enjoyed the song of the white-throated sparrow, so famously interpreted as “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” It brings to mind the early 20th century ornithologist and musician F. Schuyler Mathews, who considered phonetic transcriptions of bird song an insult to the birds. He pointed out that the song of the “Peabody-bird” could just as easily be articulated as “Sow wheat Pe-ver-ly, Pe-ver-ly, Pe-ver-ley,” or “All day whit-tl-in’, whit-tl-in’, whit-tl-in’.” The same was true, he said, for every phonetic interpretation of every

bird’s song. To correct that imprecision he labored for twenty years to transpose the songs of 127 species into dots on staves, and published them in one of the earliest identification guides to birdsong, Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, A Description of the Character and Music of Birds, Intended to Assist in the Identification of Species Common in the United States East of the Rocky Mountains (1904; expanded and reprinted in 1921).

The song of the white-throated sparrow as transcribed by Mathews

[The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's recording of a white-throated sparrow is here]

Although Mathews’s scores can be played on a piano, he insisted that to perform them accurately they must be whistled. It would take a whistling prodigy, however, to do justice to some of those songs. They include dazzlingly complex chords made by birds equipped with twin vocal mechanisms that make it possible for them to sing two notes simultaneously. Also represented are songs composed of cascades of notes—virtual waterfalls of notes—as dense as 64 to the bar. And there are songs to be whistled that we will probably never hear, such as the “strident and insectlike” song of the grasshopper sparrow, which Mathews admits is pitched “so high that 9 out of 10 people can’t hear it singing 30 feet away.”

More recently, ornithologists have counted the music output of certain songbirds and come up with astonishing figures. A red-eyed vireo was once observed singing a two- to four-note song a total of 22,197 times in a 14-hour period. The marsh warbler of Europe, Africa, and Asia spends two months of the year in its breeding grounds from the British Isles to the Ural Mountains of Siberia, then migrates to tropical Africa—a round trip of as much as 4,800 miles. During those long migrations it hears a great variety of songs from other birds, which it faithfully incorporates into a repertoire it puts to work during three to four days of virtually non-stop singing in the spring. A Belgian scientist who spent ten years studying the warbler’s song found that it mimicked as many as 210 other species during each 30-minute burst of song.

A musical prodigy closer to home, and a particular favorite of Gail’s and mine, is the brown thrasher, which should show up any day here in northern Michigan. This large, thrushlike bird has the greatest repertoire of any North American songbird and has been credited with as many as 3,000 melodies. For its performances it likes to take up a position at the top of an aspen, birch, or crab apple in partially open terrain where it can be seen and heard to full advantage. Once you hear its performance you’re not likely to forget it. It strings together jazzlike riffs mimicked from other birds and some of its own invention, and delivers them with ceaseless energy. Mathews noted that the song offers these words of advice to farmers: “Shuck it, shuck it; sow it, sow it; Plough it, plough it; hoe it, hoe it.” Thoreau reported in Walden that the brown thrasher’s “rigmarole, his amateur Paganini performances,” kept farmers company as they planted corn with the constant reminder: “Drop it, drop it, —cover it up, cover it up,—pull it up, pull it up, pull it up.”

The song of the brown thrasher, as transcribed by Mathews

[The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's recording of a brown thrasher is here]

Birds on Wires

While on the subject of birds and musical notation, here’s something strange and wonderful that a friend found on YouTube and sent along. I guarantee it will lift you up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoM4ZZJ2UrMhttp://

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…And Something New from Jerry Dennis and Glenn Wolff:

The new broadside from Jerry and Glenn—the first in their Bird Series. Learn more at www.bigmaplepress.com

SPRING: LOON CALL

They say spring advances fifteen miles a day, the pace of a leisurely walk, which is why I could experience three springs last year. The first was in March, in Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay, where new grass was sprouting in farmers’ fields and clusters of broad-winged hawks circled overhead in kettles. I counted 200 broad-wings one day, but a local birder said they sometimes numbered in the tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands—whole galaxies of hawks spiraling slowly northward with the wind. In the marshes and woodlots were other early migrants—red-winged blackbird, yellow-rumped warbler, ruby-crowned kinglet, and a brown thrasher that perched at the top of a tree beside my cabin for an hour and performed tireless variations of “Here I am, look at me.”

Three weeks later, those same birds were showing up 300 miles north, near Traverse City. The snow was finally gone from the woods; forsythia and trilliums were in bloom. Suddenly morels were popping beneath the aspens and trout were gobbling mayflies in the rivers.

Then it was time for the third spring, so I drove north again, crossed the Mackinac Bridge into the Upper Peninsula, and followed county roads until I banged up against the shore of Superior. I had the key to a friend’s cabin but had to shovel a drift away from the door before I could open it. Remnant bergs sat melting on the beach. Overhead the sky was stacked with hawks waiting for a south wind to carry them across the big lake.

Spring is the most complicated season. It arrives with reluctance, pulling its clanking train of machinery, and we recognize that the name we’ve given it is all wrong. It doesn’t spring, it creeps, two steps forward and one back—and often it backs off entirely and you have to wait a few days or a week before it tiptoes forward again.

One morning I stepped from the cabin to listen to those clanking gears and turning wheels and caught the first warm wind of the season. A familiar warbling call sounded high overhead and I looked up to see a loon hurtling past, bound for Canada. Then came another, and another, each making its ululating call.

This was the clarion announcement, the very emblem of the wild north, a song that has always stirred something deep in the souls of those who value solitude and unspoiled places. It’s the music of mist-shrouded lakes and tannin-colored ponds, a boreal timelessness best heard from a canoe. But coming from the sky above Superior it was the sound of a different wildness, one in transit, like us, winging northward into the lengthening days of the season of hope.

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THIS BOUNTIFUL WORLD – (THE MEANDERING PATH OF A BOOK IN PROGRESS)

Virtuoso Performers

I was up early this morning, listening to the dawn chorus. Is anything more emblematic of spring than the singing of birds?

Several people have written to say that they enjoyed the links to bird songs in Friday’s “Liquid Bars of Melody” post. Steve Tracey reports from the Upper Peninsula that he staved off cabin fever all winter by listening to bird songs on his computer and watching the antics of his year-old English setter Forest as he was driven nuts trying to figure out where the birds were hiding. Happy Birthday, Forest.

My friend Mary Ann Linsell wrote to say she particularly enjoyed the white-throated sparrow, with its two-toned song so famously interpreted as “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.” It brings to mind the early 20th century ornithologist and musician F. Schuyler Mathews, who considered phonetic transcriptions of bird song an insult to the birds. He pointed out that the song of the “Peabody-bird” could just as easily be articulated as “Sow wheat Pe-ver-ly, Pe-ver-ly, Pe-ver-ley,” or “All day whit-tl-in’, whit-tl-in’, whit-tl-in’.” The same was true, he said, for every phonetic interpretation of every bird’s song. To correct that imprecision he labored for twenty years to transpose the songs of 127 species into dots on staves, and published them in one of the earliest identification guides to birdsong, Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music, A Description of the Character and Music of Birds, Intended to Assist in the Identification of Species Common in the United States East of the Rocky Mountains (1904; expanded and reprinted in 1921).

The song of the white-throated sparrow as transcribed by Mathews

[The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's recording of a white-throated sparrow is here]

The song of the brown thrasher, as transcribed by Mathews

[The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's recording of a brown thrasher is here]

…And Birds on Wires

Finally, while on the subject of birds and musical notation, here’s something strange and wonderful that a friend found on YouTube and sent along:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoM4ZZJ2UrMhttp://

3 Replies