A Song for No One

 I've been running daily, and it feels so right. It helps to have Phoebe in the house; she's my inspiration and personal fitness advocate. We don't run together, because we'd be running together a half mile apart, ha! But we do bike together, and there is not much that's more fun than zooming down these hills and toiling up them with my kids. Proud to be a beast, schooled by the endless Appalachian foothills.

I usually run on my road, but I need a change of scenery now and then. Because I make lists of all the birds I hear and see on each run, it's fun to change it up and see what's singing elsewhere. I can get 50 species on my two-mile stretch of road in a single run in mid-June. The number I can hear drops steadily throughout June and July, not because there are fewer birds, but because they're too busy making more of them to sing. Boy, do I know the feeling. Busy launching my fledglings and painting pictures. It kind of rules out spending a lot of time behind the keyboard.

So I took a different road, and I found some beautiful things. If I didn't already love chicory for its inimitable blue, it's even more ravishing when punctuated by goldfinches.

 You can't crop off the guardrail or the road. They're part of the story, and beautiful too, for the way they curl through the composition.

A decrepit fenceline only adds to the charm.

It was on this road that I heard a song that stopped me in my tracks. It was coming from deep in the woods, that sloped steeply away from the road.
It was a hermit thrush.
Hermit thrushes are usually denizens of cool boreal forest. In Ohio, they seek out pockets of hemlock, with the refrigerated microclimates that go along with deep rock chasms.  The closest hermit thrushes nest in the Hocking Hills, a two-hour drive west of here.

Hermit thrushes aren't supposed to be here. My county, Washington, is the big one, five up from the bottom, on the right, the one with the notch in it. Where hermits are concerned, it's blank, for Not Reported. And as you can see, there are precious few hermit thrush breeding records statewide. That's because there's precious little hemlock habitat in Ohio, and what we have is suffering badly from the hemlock wooly adelgid, a nasty gummy white sap-sucking insect from Asia. I watched in horror as it wiped out Connecticut's hemlocks in the late 1980's, and now it's happening here. I can think of only two places in Washington Co. that have any hemlock, and I'm afraid to go look at them, afraid of what I'll find.

I borrowed this map from the Second Atlas of Breeding Birds in Ohio, the one with the Zick cover. I still get a big grin on my face every time I pull this book out for reference.  It came out in April 2016, the same spring that Baby Birds did. I was so durn proud to paint the cover for my beloved state's atlas, I can't even tell you. I sure hope they ask me to paint the Third Atlas of Breeding Birds cover, whenever that comes out! I hope I can still see to paint then!

 

Here's what it says inside. Author Paul Rodewald goes on to prognosticate that the hermit thrush may decline even more in Ohio, with the death of our hemlocks. The state has designated hermit thrush as a Species of Special Interest. 

No kidding. I was taking a special interest in this songster, hearing him on June 23, 2018, when he "should" have been far, far to the north or west, in our special pocket of HETH habitat in the Hocking Hills. 

And yet he was here. And he was lighting up the forest with his song. I'd never heard a hermit sing in Ohio in June. I made some recordings, which increased in quality over the next few days. I'll subject you only to the good ones. I could listen to them all day.

              

It is instantly addicting to spend a sunrise in this forest with that bird sending out silver spirals of notes, to no one. Or to someone. I have been there three times now, and I want to go there every morning.

 

I've never been in a woodland precisely like this one. The reason it is unique is, I'm afraid, anthropogenic. Which is to say the hand of man is heavy on this land.

There is no understory vegetation in this forest. And this is the chewed-upon pelvis bone of the reason why. 

 

People in this part of Ohio will fence and run cattle in the damnedest places. Well, they do it out West, too, put cattle in our national forests, our "multi-use" land. I won't pontificate on the propriety of that, but it isn't right ecologically to put cattle in a forest, either for the cattle or the forest. Cattle are descended from African ancestors. They belong on savannah; they belong on grasslands. Cattle eat grass. But, when forced by necessity, they will also eat anything that might try to come up in the understory of a forest. Which does not include grass.

 

So what you get when you've had cattle on a piece of land for decades, maybe hundreds of years, is topography like this. Deeply cut and eroded and trampled. And you can see for hundreds of yards. Now, that makes it pleasant to walk through, to be sure, but it is practically devoid of birds and wildflowers. I found some striped wintergreen, but most everything else trying to grow there was nonnative. Like the cattle.

Tromp and graze and cut it for enough decades, and the land becomes deeply eroded, with rivulets, most of them seasonal, running between artificial pillowed ridges. This landform was made by overgrazing. By people, and the cattle they put here. It happened when the forest was cut, grew back, was cut, grew back...and they never gave it a rest from grazing.

 

The Virginia pines, I'm thinking, dominate here because the cattle wouldn't eat them. Yes, it's a wholly artificial situation, atypical of the mixed deciduous forest in our area. There are a few beeches and red maples, but most of the cover is pine.

And pine, it seems, is close enough to hemlock for this hermit thrush. The missing understory, oddly, mimics that of hemlock forests. (Hemlocks poison plants that try to grow beneath them, and the ones that don't die get shaded out). This forest is cool and very dark, and there's lots of water. It must have felt like home to this wintering hermit thrush, enough so that he decided to stay.

 The forest is practically devoid of birds. Except This Bird. 

I kept visiting, hoping to see him singing. It was funny, being a pretty good lifelong birder, to keep coming home empty-handed. But he was singing high in the canopy first thing in the morning, and I just couldn't pick him up. 

So I lay down and made videos, imagining which treetop he might be in, while the silvery streamers of his song floated down and landed gently around me. I let hearing him be enough for me, and it was more than enough. 

 On June 26, I lay there so long--over an hour--that I zeroed in on the exact pine where I thought he might be. And then I got up and circled around, staring hard at the pine top, hoping. 

And I saw him. He was lit by the warm morning sun, a little white angel topping my best Christmas tree ever.

 

And he saw me. Hrrnh? A human?

But he didn't stop singing. He noted me and took me in and paused a few moments and then went right on with his homily.

 

And for that I was grateful. To see that song come out of his little yellow maw, well, it was a sweet reward for days of patient waiting. But it got better. I was positioning myself for a better shot, using a dead limb as a stabilizer, and he suddenly disappeared. After singing for at least an hour in one spot, he was gone. 

I saw something falling down through the canopy like a big brown leaf. It was him. He came down to have a closer look at me. 

It was so, so dark down where I was, but he paused just long enough for me to get a blurry shot that showed his rusty tail--the best mark for a hermit. 

He kept singing. And I saw another big brown leaf come up from the forest floor and land near him. It looked to me like another hermit thrush.

I left then, so as not to disturb them any further. I climbed out of the ravine, exalted by my brush with this finest of singers, thrilled that I hadn't frightened him; that instead of flying away, he'd chosen to come down to have a look at me. 

The light came through the windshield of an old junked truck, and I thought about all the crap humans leave behind on the land. Not just our junk, but our misuse and abuse of the land. We turn a bunch of animals that weigh a ton apiece loose in a forest and expect them to thrive. We never even give a thought to what our huge animals destroy; to the trails and ruts they carve in the land. We throw old cars and cans and bottles full of God knows what there, because it's a place to put junk where we won't have to look at it.

And the earth thanks us in a song like this, in a hymn for undeserving ears.

I work to deserve a song like this. I figure if I share it with you, and it brings you peace and wonder, the hermit thrush will like that. There's no way he could sing a song so beautiful without caring who hears it.