Don’t look up. That’s where you’ll find many birds: swallows and hawks up in the sky, a host of little songbirds going about their business in the high canopy. But today we’re looking at wrens, and to find wrens you look down, or perhaps occasionally into, fixing your eyes on a dense tangle of branches, adjusting the range of your focus until you catch the flicker of movement within that impenetrable mass. Wrens live at our altitudes, moored to earth, anchored by gravity, rarely climbing much above head height.
Above our head height, that is. They nimbly navigate elevations many times their head height, proportionately far less vertiginous than us clumsy, wingless humans – these aren’t ground-birds, but understory birds, birds of the branches and bark rather than the leafy lids of trees. Sometimes there will be an upper arboreal canopy, which the wrens will yield without contest to the warblers and chickadees and so on. Sometimes there won’t be, sometimes there won’t be anything but that short scrubby layer of the dry chaparral or the fog-damped coastal scrub. And within that modest stratum, the wrens comport themselves as kings.
Kingly in their attitude of incontestable personal precedence in any of life’s claims, but also in their relative social isolation. You get the impression of the first in their constant chatter, their frequent scolding of intruders, their seeming lack of fearfulness. We call kingbirds kingbirds because of their exaggerated sense of their territorial rights: no bird is more sensitive about his personal space than a male wren.
Males show territorial reactions toward other males whenever they meet, at any time of year.
– Edwin Miller, Behavior of the Bewick Wren, 1941
And this belligerence is not limited to those of their own species. Some wrens, such as house and marsh wrens, are known for their habit of destroying the eggs of other nests in their neighborhood, no matter what the species. For nearly all wrens, it can be noted that tiny and well-camouflaged as they are, they can instantly procure their safety from most larger predators by melting into the thick tangles of impassable branches. Safe in that unpursuability, wrens feel perfectly secure in sounding off to the limits of their surprisingly substantial voices. This is hardly even a retreat, since they’re only withdrawing within their own home turf. Wrens don’t flee; they just temporarily restrict the radius of their activity. Their mood seems less like fear and more like annoyance.
But all this chatter doesn’t conceal a paradoxical aloneness. Where most of the ground-dwellers, the sparrows and quails for instance, are timid conformists, living in mild-mannered fearful flocks, wrens are individualists and spend most of the year alone. They aren’t talking to their flock-mates or partners, because they don’t have any, save for the few months when male and female tolerate each other during nesting. Instead, they’re talking to the object of their displeasure, the world at large, or – in the true curmudgeon’s fashion – to themselves. And so they buzz away in constant irascibility.
Wrens are ever busybodies, and if they could not sing or chatter, or at least scold, they surely would explode.
– Dawson, The Birds of California, 1923
This combination of diminutive groundedness paired with extremely voluble boldness can easily be translated into a sort of impertinence. Imperial pretensions can seem severely overinflated. “No wren can be dignified,” Dawson goes on to say. They don’t actually win fights – they just talk big.There is an old Aesopian fable of The Eagle and the Wren, in which the wren manages to lodge a claim as king of the birds. The title was supposed to go to the highest flyer, but the wren hitched an uninvited ride on an eagle’s back, and then when the eagle reached its upper limit, the wren took a little flutter above for a technical victory. Saucy.
The 19th century American educator and do-gooder Florence Holbrook updated the tale with some bonus moralizing, in which this sneaky victory is disallowed by a wise owl and the wren creeps away, so chastened that she never again tries to fly high, “never tries to do what she cannot.” You’ve got a vein of solid natural history there, Flo – it’s true that wrens do stay pretty close to the ground. But if you’re dealing with any kids who actually know wrens, I doubt they’ll be convinced by your portrait of a meek little bird of socially-enforced humility. Healthy kids, like healthy wrens, are irrepressible and unimpressed by arbitrary rules.
Of course, the sauciness could be overemphasized too. Wrens never really wear such Disneyfied hats and frilly corsages. They’re an exceptionally plain family, dressed overwhelmingly in brown, lighter brown, and darker brown. This lack of color is another of the most emphasized traits in wren-lore. There is an entry in the Mother Goose canon entitled “The Happy Courtship, Merry Marriage and Picnic Dinner, of Cock Robin and Jenny Wren.” Here, Jenny’s a very modest type, who would never forsake her favored browns.
Twas on a merry time, when Jenny Wren was young,
So neatly as she danced, and so sweetly as she sung,
Robin Redbreast lost his heart – he was a gallant bird;
He doffed his hat to Jenny, and thus to her he said:
“My dearest Jenny Wren, if you will but be mine,
You shall dine on cherry-pie, and drink nice currant-wine.
“I’ll dress you like a Goldfinch, or like a Peacock gay;
So if you’ll have me, Jenny, let us appoint the day.”
Jenny blushed behind her fan, and thus declared her mind,
“Then let it be tomorrow, Bob; I take your offer kind.
“Cherry-pie is very good; so is currant-wine;
But I will wear my brown gown, and never dress too fine.”
The tension between these two characters exists in real, observable life – buzzy temerity and impertinent littleness stand alongside a plain, visually modest, earthbound, but lovely singer. Every bird has its characteristic behaviors, which humans have long cast in such anthropomorphizing forms for greater memorability. I’m all for it, provided that we refine, contextualize, and select the truer tales. The stories have their inaccuracies, but they also have their truths, and it’s far better to have memorable figurative truths than forgettable, strictly objective ones. If it’s too forgettable, you will forget it – and then you will have nothing at all.
In a famous debate with his friend Tolkien, C.S. Lewis took the initial position that myths were lies, “even if lies told through silver.” Tolkien successfully argued another point of view, that “myth is invention about truth.” They were talking about theology, and I’m talking about wrens, but the point is the same: the best stories get us closer to the truth.
You could be less adorned in your descriptions. The staid center of American popular ornithology these days, David Allen Sibley, sums wrens up concisely as “active but secretive.” He’s certainly not wrong. The phrase is a perfectly respectable three-word summary, appropriate to a field guide. Though even in this genre, I would opt for Hoffman’s still concise, equally practical, but much more personable, six-worder:
They are talkative at all times.
– Ralph Hoffman on the Bewick’s Wren, Birds of the Pacific States, 1927
“Active” means they move around a lot, vocalize prominently, attract our attention. “Secretive” means they stay close to cover, are small and brown and easily concealed. You could state these characteristics in such unadorned words, or you could tell tales of eagle-defiance and saucy personalities, the chastened proud or modest Jennies. Which will you remember?
Plain But Not Demure
Ideally, these two veins of learning will complement each other: the memorably figurative and the conscientiously observant. I happen to think that starting with some notion of a character, and then filling in the details, is a more interesting and motivating way to go about learning the birds than just throwing yourself upon the vast world of natural phenomena with no interpretive lens at hand to make sense of it all. But you must always test your stories against what you can actually see and hear.
Let’s start at the observational beginning: would you know a wren if you saw one? Wrens are diminutive brown birds identifiable at a glance by their prominently cocked tails, as well as by their active and chattery dispositions. The more familiar you get with birds, the more often you will recognize a given species or family by voice, often long before you see them. Nowhere is this more true than with wrens, who often give their distinctive buzzy calls even when they’re invisibly ensconced deep within the tangled branches of a downed tree. Hoffman’s “talkative at all times” is not superfluous description – it’s a very real field mark.
The primary feeding habits of wrens are fairly consistent in one particular: they stay close to the ground (or in the case of canyon wrens, close to the “walls” as well). Short flights break up their main pastime of hopping around, using their slightly elongated beaks to poke into bark and crevices for bugs and spiders. Bewick’s wrens will also come to backyard feeders for suet or small bits of shelled nuts or sunflower, but overall they prefer their food to be alive and wriggling.
A summary of the basics then: wrens are little brown birds with cocked tails and talkative personalities who specialize in hunting insects in cracks and crevices, a feeding style which keeps them close to the ground and central surfaces, rather than airborne or clinging to foliage-bearing extremities. But to categorize them merely as among the littlest and brownest of the little brown birds would be to severely underrate them. Wrens have some very real claims to fame. In particular, they are widely recognized for their objectively superlative courtship displays of two main kinds: elaborate nest-building and virtuosic singing.
Birds have various strategies for establishing pair bonds, a process in which the driving force is usually the male’s need to win female approbation. Some species wear bright and colorful plumage to display their health. Wren don’t do that, for broader reasons of their survival strategy: their approach to life is to be brown and camouflaged. For many plain-colored birds, like towhees, titmice, and ravens, this evolutionary directive aligns with the formation of lifelong, year-round pair bonds: they find a mate once, and then they stick together, without the need for yearly peacockery. But wrens aren’t like that either. Instead, they are for the most part solitary birds, buzzing to themselves in curmudgeonly isolation until the nesting season rolls around each year.
That means that wrens also need to show off each spring, and they need to do it without recourse to that common strategy of gaudy apparel. What does that leave in their toolbox that might impress the lady wrens? Exhausting hard work and actual performative talent.
Our strength and our intelligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. . . He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.
– William James, “Will, ”Principles of Psychology
Heroes aren’t made by colorful hats and billowing capes, but by an inexhaustible confidence in their reservoirs of available effort. By this scale, peacocks are no heroes, nor are eagles, but wrens step up and stand out.
The first wrenly manifestation of this is in extravagantly profligate nest-building. In various species, including our Pacific, marsh, and house wrens, males roughly assemble several nests for female inspection. This preliminary construction shows the female her potential mate’s vigor and industriousness, as well as the quality of the territory he’s secured. Once she’s made her pick, she brings some civilizing interior decoration to the place, lining his crude framework with some nice feathers or cattail fluff, perhaps topped with a fine snakeskin or choice bit of cellophane. Males like building, 2x4s, and nail guns; females tend to be better at rendering the place cosy, habitable, and attractive. Seems plausible.
The other classic way that birds show off is by singing. Wrens excel in the volume, variety, and musicality of their songs. Some of this is quantifiably superlative: Pacific wrens are said to have a volume-to-body-size ratio ten times that of crowing roosters. They bring their own amps and turn ‘em up to 11 in a world of delicate chamber musicians playing sarabandes and nocturnes.
The wrens put out the most volume per ounce of any bird that I know.
– Jon Young, What the Robin Knows
And it’s not just loudness. Those Pacific wrens sing at 36 notes per second and boast personal repertoires of between 40 and 100 different songs. Rock wrens can have over a hundred song variations and marsh wrens over 200. We’re not talking of unskilled blaring: wrens are Mozarts and Bachs in a world of kids haltingly playing “Hot Cross Buns” on their recorders.
And then there is all that is unquantifiable in birdsong. In practice, I don’t measure the decibels, tally the notes in elongated sonograms, or compare wrens by the number of their technical variations. Without numbers, the truth still shines out. I wake up in spring and the world overflows with song. I stand in the middle of an orchestra: soft flutes, crashing cymbals, sweeping melodies in the strings. There are dozens of voices, each bird competing with his rivals while doing his best to ignore the background tumult. Without the partisanship of species, we can hear the whole breadth of this cumulative fanfare. And when we listen wide, and when we listen deep, there is a voice that insists on being heard.
Yes, I see a few notes in there.
What This Looks Like Here: Our Wrens
In the Bay Area, we have six different wrens: Pacific, marsh, house, Bewick’s, rock, and canyon. The last two are pretty much absent from Marin, preferring habitats more abundantly found in hotter, dryer, inland areas. But the first four are regulars in Marin and Novato, each with its own niche.
Pacific Wren: The forest wren. Look for this tiny, dark, most stubby-tailed wren year-round in conifer forests, especially near creeks and on moist slopes. The Bear Valley trail at Point Reyes is an unmissable place to find them. Here in Novato, our only real reliable spot for them is Indian Tree Open Space Preserve: search near the creek and among steep and shady fern carpets.
Even among wrens, Pacifics are notable for the explosive abundance of their songs, which flow out with incredible volume and rapidity. Taxonomically, they were split ten years ago from the eastern winter wren and the Eurasian wren: the three remain very similar-looking birds. If you ever encounter wrens in any European cultural materials, you can picture this one, since that close relative of our Pacifics is the only wren of Europe (the wrens are overwhelmingly a family of the Americas).
A customer once gifted us some nice English tea cups from which I like to thus imbibe the spirit of the old world. I admire the wren picture with the American’s comforting sense of vestigial Anglophone familiarity – “Sure I know what a wren is! We’ve got ‘em just like that at Samuel P. Taylor!” Maybe I’ll fill it with tea, lay out the scones, and deploy the clotted cream. Even better is to mix up a flaming pot of the heartwarming comfort that is Micawber punch, the sweet citric vapors arising from the wren cup, the English sparrow cup, and the old world robin cup.
Marsh Wren: Can you guess where they live? Marsh wrens are found year-round in both freshwater ponds and salt marshes: here in Northeast Marin you can look for them at places like the Las Gallinas Ponds, Pacheco Pond, Rush Creek, the Bahia Lagoon, and Petaluma’s Ellis Creek. Habitat makes identification easy: they’re the only wren you’re likely to see darting among the cattails or the pickleweed. They have a decently strong eyebrow, just one step down from Bewick’s, and are a rather reddish-tinged brown. For much of the year, they can be frustratingly furtive, but visit the ponds in spring and it becomes much easier to get a good look at them as they climb to open perches to sing. That applies to all wrens to some degree.
House Wren: Can you guess where they live? Well, you’d probably be wrong: house wrens pretty much do not live among our houses. Given the geographic bias of American bird nomenclature, these birds were duly recognized as the traditional garden wren back east, but here their habits are distinctly different. For us, they’re essentially a summer bird who pretty much sticks to wild woodlands with a relatively open understory (Bewick’s like it dense and scrubby). To be fair to the namers, this is an exceedingly common and widespread wren in the big picture: in fact it has a larger north-to-south range than any other songbird in the whole of the New World, breeding into Canada and present down to the very tip of South America.
The easiest place to find them around here is on Mount Burdell: go up the main San Andreas Fire Road and listen for them in spring around those big valley oaks and bays spaced out in the grasslands. Compared to Bewick’s wrens, house wrens have only a weak eyebrow and are a more uniform light-reddish-brown, rather than Bewick’s strong white eyebrow and contrasting light breast and brown back. Their song is a vibrant and musical one, often starting with a quickly repeated note – “he seems to be the one bird whose cup of life is always overflowing,” as John Burroughs put it.
Bewick’s Wren:
No bird more deserves the protection of man than Bewick’s Wren. He does not need man’s encouragement, for he comes of his own accord and installs himself as a member of the community, wherever it suits his taste. He is found about the cow-shed and barn along with the Pewee and Barn Swallow; he investigates the pig-sty; then explores the garden fence, and finally mounts to the roof and pours forth one of the sweetest songs that ever was heard.
– Robert Ridgway, The Ornithology of Illinois, 1889
This is our primary wren, present all-year round and favoring habitats that are more likely to overlap with our usual haunts and homes, rather than being restricted to particular wild niches like marsh or conifer forest. We can find them in woodlands with dense understories, or dense onlystories like chaparral or coastal scrub where there aren’t really any larger trees, but they are also a fairly common yard bird, as long as you don’t keep things too neat and tidy.
Overall, Bewick’s wrens are a fairly representative, but not extreme example of most of the wren traits. They are not one of those champion singers with a repertoire in the hundreds, but they do practice a respectable 10-20 variations on a song that is nonetheless a powerful and notable part of the spring soundtrack. Nor are they one of those workaholics that routinely builds half a dozen nests, though they are notably flexible in their choice of site. I’ve personally received a local report of five years of consecutive nesting in an old motorcycle helmet, for instance. In A.C. Bent’s classic Life Histories, he quotes a Dr. Dickey’s 1940 report on Bewickian nesting habits:
Odd and wonderful are the sites that Bewick’s Wren habitually chooses for its summer home… Any opening of ready access invites its attention; among those used are holes in fence posts, tin cans, empty barrels, discarded clothing hung in buildings, baskets, bird boxes, deserted automobiles, oil wells, and crevices in stone, brick, or tile walls.
This is borne out scientifically, not just anecdotally. A study in one area found only 12% of nests were in classic tree cavities, with most in various crevices and containers in and around buildings. Sometimes they’ll nest under buildings, or in cavities in the ground. Another analysis made a specific category rarely seen in nest site surveys: abandoned cars. Bewick’s wrens will nest anywhere. People come into my store and seek my professional counsel on nest box placement:
Aspiring Landlord: Where should I put this bird house?
Jack: Well, to have it be as attractive as possible to a variety of different species, I would put it six feet or higher and definitely make sure it is solidly mounted, not loosely hanging. Most birds will feel safer a bit away from the ground, and most birds really don’t want their nursery to be swinging in the wind all day long.
AL: But I had a birdhouse hanging loosely from a low branch three feet off the ground and wrens nested in it last year.
Jack: Yeah, that sounds about right.
For beginners learning to identify their backyard birds, Bewick’s wrens are easily identified by their prominent white eyebrow. They do have one other distinctive feature in which they are truly exemplary members of their family: their long, cocked, and mobile tails. The tail is to wrens what the crest is to titmice – their most expressive part, conveying aggression and boldness, or occasionally discrete retreat. And the Bewickian tail is its superlative apotheosis. In Mexico, this species is appropriately known as the saltapared cola larga, or long-tailed wallhopper.
(I am severely tempted to call wrens “wallhoppers,” but I am kept from definitive adoption by the alluring alternative of “winter kings” (the Dutch winterkoning). They are birds of international renown.)
But who was this namesake Bewick in our Anglican-drenched nomenclature? Thomas Bewick was the great bird artist of 19th century England, and the name was bestowed by Audubon, the great bird artist of 19th century America. The two worked in rather different media and milieux: while Audubon made big color paintings for his enormously expensive book, Bewick was the master of the woodcut, a medium which allowed for widely affordable reproduction. His work fed the imagination of generations, incorporating not just illustrations of birds, but also some of the most genuine expressions of rural England.
Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting… With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon.
– Jane Eyre as a lonely lass
He seems a good man. Also, by the way, his name is properly pronounced “Bew-ick” (like Buick cars), though the “Bee-wick” pronunciation is so commonly encountered that you should probably avoid in-person pedanticism about it. It will be a losing battle. Only in writing do I give this and other pedanticisms full rein.
Despite the foreigner’s name, this is the wren we Californians should be most familiar with. Learn to place them in their proper strata: see how they haunt the ground and low branches, not climbing high like the woodpeckers and nuthatches, kinglets and warblers. Note their asociality, spending most of the year in solitude, unlike the paired titmice or flocking chickadees. Recognize the irascible buzzes, the intriguing mutterings of that querulous tyrant of a lonely kingdom who can’t help but complain of your presence. He may be the only wren in the neighborhood, but he can at least find an auditor in you.
Then see how they come to life in spring, now bursting with a variable collection of whistles and buzzes that is best-recognized by the loud series of some 4-10 staccato notes on the same pitch that ends each song: whistle, bzz, dzz, weet DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE. Around here it’s often simpler – a mere buzz before the trill. Sometimes there are several seconds of assorted prefatory material. But that loud ending tag is your key to learning this song. Listen for it in first a simple basic rendition and then a more elaborate performance:
We are no eagles, we are no orioles
And so the old stories and traditional reputations have their truths. On the one hand, wrens are notably well-grounded, small, and plain in plumage. On the other, they are generally irrepressible, and have a level of activity, tendency to talkativity, and attitude of fearlessness that defy categorization among the meek and mild of the bird kingdom. They aren’t fancy-looking compared to the golden and scarlet birds that populate the world, but their labors of spring more than make up for that lack of superficial display with extremes of effort and reservoirs of song unmatched in volume and variety.
One could easily overlook this little bird in the garden, never holding still and dashing through the tangled undergrowth. But that would overlook a character with whom we have a more than usual degree of kinship. We like to hear ourselves talk, for one thing. But there is also something that feels aspirational and worth emulating in the wren’s defiance of those who would define it among the small, weak, and inconsequential.
Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.
– Thoreau, Walden
We cannot fly high. We bear no fur or feathers of natively spectacular colors. Earthbound and earth-toned, we too compete in displays dependent not so much on mere appearance, but on actions. We build and create; we compose and perform. And if we can likewise be impelled to industrious striving that periodically erupts in glorious song, then our days of chatter are a welcome prologue to spring’s hours of triumph.
Header photo: Pacific wren by Jacob McGinnis
Thank you for allowing me the pleasure of reading such an elegantly written article (more a piece of literature) on one of my favorite subjects. I have had the privilege of having a Bewick’s Wren nest in a rambling rose trellised against the side of my house.
Cheeky, charming, always thrilling to see & to watch at my feeders & around my home…the Bewick’s Wren embodies a whole lotta attitude in a little package – a tiny bird with a big voice – delight without end…thanks for a wonderful essay, Jack!
You amaze me with your facile ability to transform the ways and life of a single bird into a work of verbal art.
Thanks Jack!
Thank you Donna, Chris, and Bo!
Such a wonderful look into the wren world – thank you!
A friend was enjoying observing a Bewicks wren nesting in a hollow orb connected to a wind chime. She watched it for weeks and saw the mom feeding the two young regularly. All was fine one day but the next she discovered a dead fledgling on the ground below the nest, no obvious damage to it, and the other fledgling dead inside the nest and no mom. Any idea what may have happened to them? My friend has since removed the wind chime nest and replaced with a beautiful wooden wren house hoping for safer lodging.
Hard to say for sure Tracy. Something could have happened to the parents, leaving the young with no feeders and defenders. Very high temperatures can kill nestlings (if the orb was in the sun, with no ventilation, that improvised nest site could indeed have been less safe than a well-ventilated nesting box). Hopefully they will re-nest promptly!
Thanks very much for the insights Jack – hopefully the new digs will be a better location. I recently saw a pic of a bird feeding a fledgling that was nesting in a hub cap!