Today has been the most beautiful kind of Fall day, cloudy, gray and moody, cool and damp, after rain overnight that washed down still more leaves. The wet yards and roads were thickly spattered with yellow and brown. By mid-morning the rain had paused, but clouds hung low and dark, and more rain was expected later in the day. It\u2019s been the rare and wonderful kind of day when the temperature falls as the day goes on \u2013 it began in the mid 60s and by mid-afternoon would fall into the low 50s, and yet, there was hardly any wind at all. An unusual quiet surrounded me as I walked, peaceful and mellow, with the bittersweet feeling that comes in late Fall.<\/p>\n
There were not a great many birds at first, and I didn\u2019t carry binoculars because of the chance of rain \u2013 I would regret that, as I usually do. But it was a good day for listening, and as it turned out, the highlights of the morning were not what I saw \u2013 but what I heard. For the first part of the way, there were the usual suspects \u2013 the scattered chatter of Carolina Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, and Carolina Wrens, the peeps of a Northern Cardinal here and there, the whinny of a Downy Woodpecker.<\/p>\n
Then as I was walking past a stretch of woods I heard a liquid chup-chup<\/em> call from somewhere among the trees, not too far away. It was a sound I\u2019ve been waiting to hear, listening every day for the past two or three weeks at least, and beginning to wonder if one would return this year, and finally here it was \u2013 a Hermit Thrush.<\/p>\n A Hermit Thrush is a pale-brown songbird similar in shape to a robin, with a spotted throat and breast, and a habit of raising its long cinnamon tail sharply and lowering it slowly, often doing this as it calls a soft chup, <\/em>and looks around alertly with its head erect and watchful. Hermit Thrushes are only here at this time of year \u2013 from late Fall into Spring, when they leave to spend the nesting season in northern forests and a wide range of territories throughout North America. Though I don\u2019t often hear them sing while they\u2019re here \u2013 a song so lovely it has inspired many poets and other writers \u2013 the soft, simple call of chup<\/em> seems to me almost as haunting and as sweet. Hermit Thrushes are woodland birds, not particularly shy, but easy to overlook because of their quiet appearance and solitary behavior. In the winter here, I often find them – each one alone \u2013 around wooded yards, feeding on the ground close to shrubs and flying up to low branches of trees when startled.<\/p>\n I stood for several moments on the edge of the road, listening and looking, trying to spot a bird among the trees, but I couldn\u2019t find it and finally walked on. Even without seeing it, to hear its call was the highlight of the morning, as vivid as any sighting could be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today has been the most beautiful kind of Fall day, cloudy, gray and moody, cool and damp, after rain overnight that washed down still more leaves. The wet yards and roads were thickly spattered with yellow and brown. By mid-morning the rain had paused, but clouds hung low and dark, and more rain was expected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2138"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2139,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2138\/revisions\/2139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/birdingnotes.sigridsanders.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}