The ferns drip with cold water, the moss glows, and invisible dissonances ring out in the redwood-tethered fog. The harmony is strange, and there is no melody: the chords are isolated and enisled in a sea of resonant silence. They are voices in the shadows ‒ shadows that from time to time rustle with the vague suggestion of a dispersed and hidden presence, but which refuse to tie actors to actions, to tie anything so mundane as a living body to these rain-plucked strings of the winter forest.
But there is a bird behind this strange music. The books call it the varied thrush; traditional names include winter or mountain robin, pointing out its kinship with that more familiar cousin. The robin and the winter robin are our two large representatives of the thrush family, finest of all singers, and share numerous traits of size, shape, habitat, and diet.
But where the robin is familiar, the varied thrush is mysterious. Anyone can see a robin stepping out of their doorway, but to most people in our latitudes the varied thrush is as personally nonexistent as the Formosan clouded leopard. And even to those who seek them out, they retain an aura of insubstantiality, as if they could melt back into the shadows at any moment and disappear from human observation, as they more or less can.
Varied thrushes nest across the northwest, from far northern California up through Alaska. In winter, they retreat from the mountains and the cold interior, heading for the temperate shelter of the coast or central and southern California. That’s where we come in, with our redwoods and fog-bathed forests seasonally strewn with these birds of the Northwest, lovers of the damp. In some years there are few, with conditions and food availability to the north reducing the southward impetus. In other years there are more, overflowing the conifer forests and spilling into denser woodlands of live oaks and bays, or occasionally beyond into our human neighborhoods, to our surprise and astonishment.
People notice varied thrushes when they appear outside the forest. Within it, they are easily overlooked by the unaware. But it is best to find the winter robins in their native setting, where the air is heavy, pregnant with life, where the earth feels bibulous of the wet decay, and where an atmosphere of close obscurity deepens and pervades, clinging to the birds like a permanent and inseparable perfume.
The general rule of looking for thrushes in Marin is to head to the conifer forests, the wetter the better. This could be Douglas-firs at Point Reyes, Bishop pines at Tomales Bay, or redwoods on Mount Tam. Even modest patches of conifers, like my local favorite at Novato’s Indian Tree Preserve, host regular winter troops.
See them and they are striking birds, boldly painted in charcoal and orange, carbon latent and combusting. Males are most vivid, the smoldering embers of their breast and the flickering flames on their wings and face glowing amid a night-dark tracery of nearly black markings. Females are a lower contrast variation on the same theme, with browner grays and more muted breasts and eyebrows: the embers cooling at dawn as the mattely clouded sky sunlessly undarkens. Watch closely and patiently and you can see them going about their business in the forest, eating berries and acorns, hunting worms and crawling creatures like any other bird. But it is when they sing that they are most arresting.
Above all a strangeness
Bird song is primarily a behavior of the nesting season. As winter visitors, our varied thrushes are most often quiet and discrete. But as with many birds, you will hear the occasional burst of music even at this time of year. Spend enough hours in the forest and you will start to notice that brief individual performances are not uncommon; spend enough time there and you will sooner or later arrive on the right day, a wet day, when the weather unlocks their sense of home and the nesting territory. Then the whole woods ring.
It is a song unlike that of any other bird, consisting of isolated, resonant chords (yes, chords ‒ birds can sound multiple frequencies at once). In the abstract, this lack of melody and continuous fluidity might seem to hardly count as song, might seem to relegate the performers to the unfortunate tier of birds who are condemned to communicate with inarticulate chirps and squeals, hardly better than grunting mammals and croaking amphibians. But the song of the varied thrush is not like that.
In deep forests of fir in western Washington and Oregon where the sun barely struggles through to fleck the lower branches, out of the silence comes a long-drawn quavering note with something of the quality of escaping steam; after a short interval the note is repeated in a higher pitch, again in a lower, ee-ee-ee-ee. The notes have a meditative quality due to their deliberation and above all a strangeness due partly to their quality and partly to the complete invisibility of the singer.
– Hoffman, Birds of the Pacific States, 1927
“A strangeness” is the song’s preeminent quality according to that classic manual. And it often evokes such responses, such descriptions outside of normal terminology. In the Peterson Field Guide to Bird Sounds, modern ornithologist Nathan Pieplow likewise exhausts a restrained and professional diction. His usual vocabulary is conservative and technical, employs words like “complex,” “clear,” “buzzy,” “upslurred.” How does he describe the voice of the varied thrush? “Haunting.”
Pieplow captions his beloved sonograms as “musical but dissonant,” which gives a clue to the unusual qualities of this sound.
Here you can see that strange phenomenon of polyphony: two or three notes, sounded simultaneously, a feat beyond our physical capability. The intervals are varied and unpredictable, a language beyond our mental comprehension. Sometimes they seem to approach a chord of human consonance: octaves, fifths, and thirds, results of the simple ratios of vibrations that our minds can make sense of. But sometimes they don’t. They may be chords that completely ignore our notions of harmony, ignore even our notions of dissonance, trained as we are to the convenient approximation of equal temperament, of dividing the octave into twelve neat and orderly halftones of identical distance.
The varied thrushes don’t play equal tempered chords on a piano, don’t stick to our approved list of notes. They play three strings on an unfretted violin (a two-bow trick), splay their fingers in an arbitrary disposition, and subtly correct their placement like a exactingly tone-deaf teacher ensuring that every note is out of tune. Most human singers would find this difficult, would naturally gravitate towards a more settled and consonant interval. But varied thrushes are not human: they hold the chord in perfect stability in the furnace of sound, until it forges a new and alien harmony.
There are dissonances beyond our ability to categorize, dissonances that in their strangeness leave behind that narrow human word. Alone, a singing thrush can easily be psychologically dismissed as an oddity, an unusual and out-of-tune bird. But put yourself in a place and time where you hear not just one bird, but a chorus, and your instinctive understanding of human harmony will be more seriously disturbed and rekiltered, with all your ways of thinking temporarily compelled to new perspectives, broken out of the rut of normalcy. What is the cue for such a symphony? Water, water that dampens the everyday voices, that quiets the hall for the rising waves of tolling strangeness.
The Varied Thrush loves rain as a fish loves water; while as for the eternal drizzle, it is his native element and vital air. Sunshine he bears in stoical silence or else escapes to the depths of the forest glade. But let the sun once veil his splendors, let the clouds shed their gentle tears of self-pity, let the benison of the raindrops filter through the forest, and let the leafage begin to utter that myriad soft sigh which is dearer than silence, and our poet Thrush wakes up. He mounts the chancel of some fir tree and utters at intervals a single long-drawn note of brooding melancholy and exalted beauty, a voice stranger than the sound of any instrument, a waif echo stranding on the shores of time.
– Dawson, The Birds of California, 1923
The song of the winter robin is simple, but still musical: a gong, a chime, a touch on the strings of a harp. And when you are fortunate enough to hear not just one bird, but many, when you arrive in the right piece of forest at the right time, when the right confluence of atmospheric portents simultaneously strikes a group of thrushes into one mind and feeling, then you will hear the trees ring not with one touch of the strings, but with an enveloping cascade, as if your ear was bent low to an undamped piano of a thousand unknown keys, resonating from every side. And all the while you look skyward into the backlit, clouded canopy, seeking the source of those unearthly emanations and seeing only shadows.
Header photo by Mick Thompson
Truly enchanting; love the Dawson quote – thank you, Jack!