These last few days have been very windy, and I never tire of watching the trees on the back slope bobbing and swaying to the wind’s non-choreographed rhythms. The forest floor will certainly be littered with debris, dead branches and twigs, and there will most likely be a few more victims to add to the crosshatched pattern of dead trees that have accumulated up on the ridge over the years.
One morning last week, however, I was greeted very early with another spring treat: The return of the thrushes, birds slightly smaller than the American robin that produce unmistakable flute-like songs from the deep woods. It was not quite 5 a.m. when I heard the ethereal sound emerge from the mist on this gray overcast day following yet another night of rain.
The tapping on the roof stopped sometime after midnight and was replaced at dawn with the sounds of the first birds, the chickadees and titmice and a lone woodpecker at work somewhere on a distant tree trunk. From their mixed melody rose the distinctive song of the wood thrush, a sound that is quite impossible to describe to anyone who’s never heard it.
A bit of research reveals that I was correct in my assumption that there are at least two different thrushes in these woods, including the wood thrush and the hermit thrush, at least one of which I’ve seen scuttling across the upper slope in search of food. What they lack in physical beauty they more than make up for with their songs, as all thrushes are capable of singing two notes at the same time and harmonizing on their own, which accounts for their melodious sound.
The wood thrush, hermit thrush and Swainson’s thrush are all migratory, arriving in this neck of the woods in mid-spring to breed and then departing for more southern climes some time in August. Many other birds are related to the thrushes, including the American robin, the Eastern bluebird and the veery. Whereas many similar birds are impossible to identify correctly in dense woods, there is no mistaking the sound the thrushes make on a warm summer night. And it is with unabashed delight that I welcome them back each year, as the bird symphony here is not complete without their contribution.
I realized recently that this is the first year I’ve been able to witness spring’s total unveiling, for the current work that I’m doing allows me to be at home a good part of the day and to spend time appreciating the early morning delights possible only in such a place as this. Never before was I privy to the slow methodical unfurling of the leaves or the tiny increments by which each growing thing emerges from the soil.
In the past, whole weeks often went by before I remembered to stop and look, really look, at what was happening all around me in my absence, processes that needed no help from me to move forward. and that will proceed hopefully long after I’ve gone. It made me painfully aware of how ignorant so many of us are of those processes upon which so much of our lives depend. and that we pay so little heed to and take so much for granted.
For how diminished would those lives be were it not for the bulbs that sleep under the snow just waiting for the moment when they can once again break free to splash the spring landscape with their color, or how barren the urban canvas without the bursts of yellow supplied by the forsythia at this time of year?
Just yesterday, I drove by a front lawn that was simply spilling over with these golden beauties, from foundation plantings to a mass planting along the road’s edge. Someone planted them there, you say. They just didn’t happen on their own. But without the affection the earth demonstrates in receiving and nurturing all new life, whether spontaneous or planned, no green thing could flourish, from spontaneous weeds to transplanted tomatoes.
I make it a point now to remind myself of this each day, and of the fact that I am only a single element in this grander scheme, of which I am fortunate beyond words to be a part.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, can be reached via e-mail at rlovejoy84253@roadrunner.com.
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