There is a quiet bird of winter who appears each year outside my door. He is alone, discrete – no flocking sparrow or piping chickadee. He blends in, wrapped in russet, his cloudy breast thoroughly spotted like a leaf-strewn forest floor. Only his tail hints of color, but even that is an earthy umber, no vivid woodpecker red, but the tint of clay, nine parts brown to one part scarlet. He springs up to catch a berry, his wings blink, and he returns to earth. Again he holds still, and merges with the low tangle of branches and with the faded, fallen bark of weary madrones.
This is the hermit thrush, most celebrated of all American singers, the bird that puts the European skylarks and nightingales to shame. In the California summer, they live in the forests and sing from the treetops; they avoid the settlements, and I make pilgrimages to hear them. But in winter they come to us, disperse through the lowlands and towns, and become neighbors.
In truth, we have several separate populations of hermit thrush: some winter birds come from the north, some come from the mountains, and then a separate breeding population arrives from Mexico as the winter birds depart, around April. The hermit thrushes we hear in summer are not the birds we see in winter. What does it mean to know this? It means that the birds we see in winter are the hardiest of the small thrushes, the only members of their genus not to flee the continent when the days grow short. Or perhaps not hardier, but luckier: their instincts prompted them to fly on a fortunate course, the same one we followed, to the safe shelter of California’s coast, land of gentle seasons.
But in a few months those instincts will reverse, and a different group of birds, hundreds of miles to the south, will enter into the same cycle. The earth orbits the sun, and when it reaches a certain point the thrushes move together, like two fingers of one hand set upon a map, then lifted and moved northward. We have hermit thrushes all year round, but not because they are stay-at-homes like titmice and towhees. It is rather because we provide both winter haven to the spent birds of northern nesting and the forests that mean home to the birds of the south.
It was barely perceptible at first. It strengthened slowly. And it was a sensation vastly different from the autumn migratory urge. The call to migrate south had been a vague, restless yearning for movement in which the goal was only dimly defined, but in this new call the goal was everything and the migration itself would be incidental. The essence of what the curlew felt now was a nostalgic yearning for home. And the goal was explicit–not merely the arctic, not the tundra, but that same tiny ridge of cobblestone by the S twist of the river where the female would come and the nest would be.
– Last of the Curlews, Fred Bodsworth
Birds act and feel differently in spring and winter. To really grasp this fundamental fact in the lives of birds requires a deep shift in perspective, relatively divorced as we are from the year’s cycle. (I know of no better way to feel this change than to read Bodsworth’s novella.) We have a vague notion of spring fever and the restlessness of warming weather. But for birds the lengthening and shortening of days trigger overpowering reactions: the urge to move, to fight, and to sing.
The hermit thrush is among the best examples of this inner transformation because his migratory patterns allow us to encounter both his seasons, and to be struck by their memorable divergence. No one forgets the fluting forest vespers of his summer song. And then in winter he comes down to earth, skirts the towns, and shuffles in the leaf litter with quiet modesty.
“Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)” said Whitman, poet of thrushes and much else. In our everyday life we think of beings as singular and consistent entities; in our reflective moments we realize that we are less easy to pin down than we thought. Birds have fewer inner contradictions than humans and rarely contain multitudes. But many contain two.
When we see a winter thrush, we see that spring’s inspiration has receded. But we remember the song, and we understand that to recede is not the same as to be extinguished, that there is an ebb and flow in the compulsion to music. To know a hermit thrush in winter is to know a vessel that poured out its contents all summer long and waits for a new spring to fill it again to overflowing. To know a songbird in his quiet season is to understand latency and potential, the quality that waits for a sign from without, and will be ready when that call comes.
The law of nature is alternation for evermore. The soul environs itself with friends that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. The instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase.
– Emerson, “Friendship”
Humans are subject to an ongoing tension between sociability and a need for solitude. With birds, we see the division between these two modes of being more clearly, neatly separated by season, and we are better able to understand the equally natural status of both instincts. Genes and chemical changes, sparked in birds by the simple shortening of days, triggered in humans by a more complex and variable mesh of circumstances, are enough to steer us ineluctably towards or away from the company of others. But like the hermit thrush, we go alone for a season that we may sing a sweeter song. A thrush in winter is not devoid of music: he is ripening. And spring will see his fruit.
Why We Listen, Part I: It Banishes All Trivialness
For most people, that is the season of the hermit thrush – spring and summer, the season of singing. Many of the thrush acolytes seem to treat him primarily as a disembodied voice. (This is as good a point as any to remark that I am using male pronouns throughout this account partly for syntactical simplicity and partly because singing is a primarily male activity. And as a general statement, I dislike using plural “they” and “them” when I’m talking of individuals, and I abhor using “it” when speaking of a living, acting bird.) This trend began with the English Romantic poets, who celebrated and elevated the songs of birds to high spiritual dimensions, most famously in Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” and Shelley’s “To a Skylark.” The succeeding generation of writers in America looked for similar inspiration in our native fauna and found in the hermit thrush a more than worthy peer to its European predecessors in verse.
A pale reflection of the first-hand experience
For a hundred years or so, the hermit thrush encomium was practically a genre unto itself of American nature writing. Any poet with a taste for natural history attempted it, as did any bird writer with literary inclinations. As with any birdsong, you can still listen to a singing hermit thrush with your own ears and form your own fresh impressions. But if you think that words can do anything to communicate nature, music, or the spiritual essence of existence, then this is the bird on which to test the hypothesis, because our best and most eloquent voices have made the attempt.
Start with Thoreau, who returned again and again to this song in his journal (he did not separate the hermit thrush and the wood thrush):
July 5, 1852: [In the thrush’s song,] there is the liquid coolness of things that are just drawn from the bottom of springs. The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest… Wherever he hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring. Wherever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him. Most other birds sing from the level of my ordinary cheerful hours—a carol; but this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than that I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigor. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institutions; to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner of his own low thoughts.
June 22, 1853: This is the only bird whose note affects me like music, affects the flow and tenor of my thought, my fancy and imagination… It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses. It changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness.
(Incidentally, Thoreau’s journal also presents evidence that Emerson too knew his thrushes: in the entry of June 22, 1856 is recorded the simple line “R.W.E. imitates the wood thrush by he willy willy—ha willy willy—O willy O,” an unmistakable rendition of the hermit.)
Immortal beauty and vigor, the amendment of human institutions in the light of higher and truer views, and a fountain of youth that changes all hours to an eternal morning and banishes all trivialness – even for Thoreau, those are pretty high expectations for a little bird. And he’s not alone. Here’s John Burroughs, a hugely popular nature writer of the next, post-Emerson generation:
Ever since I entered the woods, even while listening to the lesser songsters, or contemplating the silent forms about me, a strain has reached my ears from out of the depths of the forest that to me is the finest sound in nature,—the song of the hermit thrush.
… It is not a proud, gorgeous strain, like the tanager’s or the grosbeak’s; suggests no passion or emotion,—nothing personal,—but seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best moments. It realizes a peace and a deep, solemn joy that only the finest souls may know. A few nights ago I ascended a mountain to see the world by moonlight, and when near the summit the hermit commenced his evening hymn a few rods from me. Listening to this strain on the lone mountain, with the full moon just rounded from the horizon, the pomp of your cities and the pride of your civilization seemed trivial and cheap.
– Wake-Robin, 1871
The finest sound in nature, the calm, sweet solemnity of our best moments, a peace and deep joy knowable only to the finest souls, and – as Thoreau found – the antidote to triviality. This sense of something fine and divine, something sacred, is perhaps the note most often sounded in these early written appreciations. These writers sought a capital “R” Romantic exaltation in nature and the hermit thrush was where they found it.
This kept up in the bird writers of the first half of the 20th century, before they grew fearful of unprofessional excitement. Once again, William Leon Dawson, in his 1923 Birds of California:
He who has not in his heart a separate place for the Hermit Thrush is no bird lover. He who has never heard the evening requiem of the Hermit has missed the choicest thing which Nature in California has to offer. He who, having listened to that song, does not feel a responsive glow and a quickening of the spirit, has need of more than Nature’s ministries. He needs most to find his God and to have his sins forgiven.
The song of the Hermit Thrush is a thing apart. It is sacred music, not secular. Having nothing of the dash and abandon of Wren or Ouzel, least of all the sportive mockery of the Long-tailed Chat, it is the pure offering of a shriven soul, holding acceptable converse with high heaven. No voice of solemn-pealing organ or cathedral choir at vespers ever hymns the parting day more fittingly than this appointed chorister of the eternal hills. Mounted on the chancel of some low-crowned fir tree, the bird looks calmly at the setting sun, and slowly phrases his worship in such dulcet tones, exalted, pure, serene, as must haunt the corridors of memory forever after.
In his Birds of Washington, Dawson adds this concluding statement:
One forgets all trivial things as he listens to the angelic requiem of the Hermit at eventide. Not Orpheus in all his glory could match that.
There it is again, that antonym of definition to which all three of these close observers and high enthusiasts of nature are drawn: the song of the hermit thrush is not trivial. Even if you, a wised up modern, feel you must set aside all this talk of the gates of heaven and Orphic comparisons, you may not yet be utterly inoculated from the occasional sense of triviality in much of daily life. That is firm enough footing for even the logically-minded: the acts of birds are not trivial, they are necessary. The songs of birds are never filled with superfluous effects; they are music distilled to its instinctive essence.
And should you find your life become a train of endless flitting from trivial obligations to trivial distractions, then walk alone into an evening forest when the sun sets and the hermit sings. Strain your ears for that floating apparition and notice how you have already slowed your breath and quieted your thoughts, so intent you are to listen, to listen closer and closer. At such moments, I concede without resistance the gap between the trivial and the essential, between life as I have lived it and the lives of birds.
Why We Listen, Part II: Requiem
There is another element that listeners have repeatedly found in the song of the hermit thrush: melancholy and mourning, though still overlaid with that spiritual sweetness. This theme was most memorably set down in Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and then became a recurrent motif in American letters and culture. The first version is still the best, combining Whitman’s overarching reflection on loss with an awareness of the bird itself (when T.S. Eliot repeats the trope in “The Wasteland,” for instance, he is referencing Whitman’s poem much more than his first hand avian experience).
In the swamp in secluded recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
…
O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for the large sweet soul that has gone?
…
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,
Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.
…
And the singer so shy to the rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death, and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt me,
And I held as if by their hands my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.
…
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in the night.
The hermit thrush is Catharus guttatus (and has been since Whitman’s day). Catharus comes from the same Greek root as “cathartic,” referring to something that is pure, clean, and cleansed. Originally, that genus name seems to have been applied to another bird that was “clean” plumaged (this particular thrush is after all, guttatus, spotted), but I prefer to reappropriate it to the impression of the hermit thrush’s song in its Whitman-ized form: loud and strong, pure and deliberate, clear and limitless.
Where does Whitman end and the hermit thrush begin? We know the thrush himself is not mourning; we can assume that his understanding of his song is basically similar to a robin’s view of his overture of confidence. But to acknowledge this doesn’t deny the existence of a more or less consistent impression that hearing this song makes on people. I am not confusing human reactions with avian intentions. We have deeply rooted, instinctive responses to much of nature: blue skies and a flower-filled meadow make us feel very differently than dark, looming clouds and fallen leaves, regardless of the biological mechanisms which lead to those flowers’ form and color. And the song of the hermit thrush sounds melancholy.
The pace is slow: the clear, distinct notes that introduce each phrase are widely spaced. The tone is plaintive: the clear, high, whistled notes are not booming, defiant, chipper, or violently anguished, while the subsequent delicate fluting is delicate and ethereal. The pitches are more distinct than average birdsong, closer to human music, more impactful according to the long training of human habit. And the thrush’s typical settings are in still and shaded forests, the suitably muted cathedrals of nature.
Consider one of Whitman’s modern successors. Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, from 2011, employs this song for a scene of mourning. Jessica Chastain has lost a son, and in the aftermath she leaves the house, goes out alone, and walks into the pines. (This video is a compilation of scenes; the thrush scene is only the continuous 25 seconds first shown.)
This is both ornithological accuracy (Malick is the rare filmmaker that knows his birds) and emotional accuracy. This is not a song of crowded cities or of suburban yards, this is a song that floats down as an unseen voice from the treetops, where we are surrounded by organisms taller and older than ourselves, where the light is softened and obscured, and where the world is converted into one of brown, color of rest and earthly dissolution, and green, color of contentment and rebirth.
The bird is not mourning and the forest is not sad. But lay beneath the trees at the sun’s setting when the thrush sings, as song and day fade together, and you may feel those same gentle intimations of the ending of things.
Why We Listen, Part III: What is Unbroken, Distilled
Amy Clampitt ends her book of poems Archaic Figure with “A Hermit Thrush.” This volume is very much a book, thematically unified, delving into the past, filled with figures of myth, the landscapes of Greece, and the literary ghosts of England. But she ends it with what is older still: rocks and tides, trees and the movement of planets. And last of all with a singing bird. Here are the final stanzas of the book:
Little is certain, other than the tide that
circumscribes us, that still sets its term
to every picnic–today we stayed too long
again, and got our feet wet–
and all attachment may prove at best, perhaps,
a broken, a much-mended thing. Watching
the longest day take cover under
a monk’s-cowl overcast,
with thunder, rain and wind, then waiting,
we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music. From what source (Beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive–
diminished sequences so uninsistingly–
not even human–there’s
hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.
The poem as a whole depicts the uncertainties and instable flux of the world. The few things that seem relatively certain to us are themselves forms of change: the shortening of days as the earth makes its revolution around the sun, the in and out of the tide that marks the shorter passage of time. Against these physical forces, life continues and persists: trees endure the salt air and windswept shoreline, plants put forth new growth, and we humans devise mental knots to give us some sense of linkage and attachment, anchors in a shifting world.
What does this have to do with the song of the hermit thrush? With the precision of both a poet and a watcher of birds, Clampitt’s description provide numerous clues, small insights and fresh perspectives on this music. “Distills” could not be bettered as a single-verb encapsulation of what those older writers labored to express in verbose paragraphs: this song seems to embrace a large swathe of existence and strain out the superfluous, leaving us with the most essential part of things. The song is “fragmentary” but “in the end / unbroken” — superficially composed of discrete and separate phrases, but upon inspection forming a coherent and persuasive whole. She knows it is not human music, but recognizes its capacity for touching us all the same, so subtly and “uninsistingly” does it seem like the voice of a foreign species. All these little details ring true.
But there is one central question that she raises: do these “links” we perceive in the hermit thrush’s song, those connections that reveal it to be not merely fragmentary but actually whole and unbroken, come from beyond us, some larger metaphysical unity we share with the birds? Or from within us, more knots of our own devising? Her answer is to not answer, to decline the question as unanswerable and not worth worrying over. What we can recognize among the world’s uncertainties is that we are prompted to “stop and listen,” and that when we do so the world — botched and much-mended as it is, imperfectly held together by our transient guy lines though it may be — is revealed to us as what we may with quiet contentment and a modest abstinence from grand claims term “not unsatisfactory.”
The poet’s double negative is more precise and nuanced, but I will set it out in blunt, plain prose: the song of the hermit thrush satisfies us, though we know not why. It is music to us, though we do not know whether what we perceive as music is composed by the bird, by ourselves, or by some force beyond. The world is constantly breaking down under the passage of time, and we do our best to patch it up, to make sense of it, to repair the damage and dissolutions. But in the song of the hermit thrush we hear something that, hesitant and fragmentary though it may be, is in the end unbroken and does not need our mending.
Have you picnicked by the ocean? Have you found safe shelter from a storm? And have you dropped everything to listen to the song of a bird? Then you have felt what this poem describes: the not unsatisfactory phenomenon of life, amid all its many uncertainties.
Where the Poet Dwells
In the end, that is what counts: your own experience. That is the purpose to which I repeat these old words: to encourage you to find, help you to enrich, and prompt you to remember your own encounters with this song and with its singer. Decide for yourself what the poets invented and what the bird, or whether you can tell at all where the one ends and the other begins. Decide for yourself whether these writers describe merely their own personal and particular reactions, or whether they speak of something that your own nature feels when you hear this song.
In the deep heart of man a poet dwells
Who all the day of life his summer story tells;
Scatters on every eye dust of his spells,
Scent, form, and color to the flowers and shells
…
When thrushes ope their throat, ‘t is he that sings
And he that paints the oriole’s fiery wings.
– Emerson, “In the deep heart of man a poet dwells,” titled in draft “The Enchanter”
The scents of flowers, the rainbows on deep sea-shells, and the songs of birds don’t come from the outside alone — not as we perceive them. How the receiver regards the phenomena of life makes all the difference in the world: to some the forest seems a dull place, and to others it seems full of magic and unending richness. I share these passages and poems not as definitive statements of the nature of birds, but as examples of how anyone’s inner poet can cast those spells which bring to life the world’s colors and sounds.
There are innumerable paths, but the first doorway is the same. You may hear a sacred chant, a shy lament, or the steady satisfaction of a not-quite-human thing. You may hear something entirely different — you don’t need to memorize verses or rely on the interpretations of old ghosts. Maybe it will help you to enter the forest laden with the pages of the past, guides to point you in a general direction. But your path is unique and only your feet can find it.
What is the doorway? Where is the gate? The hermit is shy, and best approached alone and quietly, phone off and hat in hand. But if you wish to be received in his cathedral of trees, there is only one ticket needed, free to anyone: set aside trivial things, open your ears, and embrace the enchanter’s dust falling upon your eyes.
Header photo: hermit thrush at the magic hour by Emilie Chen.
Jack. This is beautifully written! If it was you that composed it and included such wonderful quotes…I congratulate you on a paper well done. Much enjoyed. Jerry Swanson
Thanks Jerry! It was definitely me, no one else collects obscure bird quotes (and obscure quotes to be made into bird quotes) like I do!
Simply: lovely… thank you, Jack!
Thanks Chris! And thank you again for the book of old stuff – my favorite genre!
Many evenings in early Spring, I have been mesmerized by this sacred music, yearning to find its source. Thank you Jack for enlightening me.
You are welcome Prem! Thanks for providing evidence to any doubters that this is special music to listen to, even if you haven’t already been reading about how wonderful hermit thrushes are.
Jack– I have read many pages this past week, but none as enlightening and beautiful as these. Being the dense bird-looker that I am, I don’t know if I have ever heard a hermit thrush, but I recognize the transcendent experience you (and the poets) describe so beautifully.
Stephanie P
PS I thought I was the only person left in the English-speaking world to decry the singular “they”!
You have something very nice to look forward to then! Head for the forests in May and June, preferably near creeks. Thank you for the kind words and keep standing up for those third person singular pronouns!
Jack – What can I say? Another beautiful winner.
Ah, my lovely friend, the hermit. Loved this unassuming bird before I read anything about it. Also loved The Tree of Life. Extraordinary film. You share the heart of Whitman and Emerson!
Great piece – thank you for writing this. I’m honored to that you included one of my recordings. Like many before me, I too have been enchanted by this bird.