This semester, for just the third time in my 30 years teaching at Penn State New Kensington, I have a weekday without classes. My plan is to work at home on these open Thursdays so that I can edit, compile, and organize the past ten years of my nature essays and blogs. I also plan to look out the window a lot.
(Image Credit Flickr/ Kelly Colgan Azar)
I was accomplishing the window looking part of my day this past Thursday when I saw a very familiar, but very unexpected bird, poking around in the thawed soil underneath the arbor vitae.
It was a wood thrush!
Wood thrushes are, wonderfully, abundant in our area starting in late March and continuing through the summer. We are lucky to have this beautiful, yet elsewhere declining, species living in the close-by areas of second growth hardwood forest. We especially notice them when the males are singing their flute-like songs in the spring and early summer as they battle for their territories and try to attract a mate. Last spring down on the nearby Roaring Run Trail, I was regularly serenaded and even stalked by male wood thrushes as I biked through the chain of their territories in the woods along the Kiskiminetas River.
Their songs decline as the serious business of incubating eggs and feeding nestlings proceeds, but walks up through the woods through the summer almost always affords a glimpse of a wood thrush digging through the leaf litter or flying skillfully through the dense, tangled branches of the shrubs and trees.
Wood thrushes migrate to southern Mexico or Central America in September and October and do not usually return to our area until late March or early April. The bird I saw, then, is either four months late leaving or two months early returning!
This wood thrush was also the first of his species to visit my yard. He must have been quite hungry to leave the preferred shelter of the forest and enter the open habitat of my yard to search for insects or worms. The heavy cover of snow and ice must have driven him to seek any thawed, open area. I did not see him find anything very large during his hunting (no rising nightcrawlers in the wet, thawed soil) but he did work the litter and soil under the arbor vitae for the ten minutes I watched from the window. When I looked out again about 20 minutes later, he was gone. As far as I know, he has not returned.
I have been enjoying our winter birds and have been keeping our feeders full of black oil sunflower seeds. I also keep our heated birdbath next to the feeders clean and full of freshwater. Juncos, cardinals, titmice, chickadees, Carolina wrens, downy woodpeckers, house finches and more have been both abundant and a joy to observe. But having a wood thrush drop by, even for a few minutes makes this winter, window bird watching experience all that much more rewarding.
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Bill and Deborah, We were out this weekend wallowing in the mud. First to repair a broken water line in the barn and since we were muddy already, decided to tackle a few small projects that were not actually on our calendar until April!!! These projects kept us outside and yes, in the mud. Enough said about mud, what I am really getting to is the fact that there were so many honey bees out and about. They especially seemed attracted to the horses! I was glad to see so many honeybees, but maybe not on January 13th! Will this have any impact on the Spring? Last but not least, great information on the wood thrush! I hope he is there every Thursday so you can see him out the window!!!!