… with their much-sought-after song, are back in UD‘s trees.

What they don’t tell you is that wood thrush never shut up.

You spend the first week after they’ve appeared in ecstasy.

You spend the rest of the summer wanting to throttle them.

As I write, a wood thrush is in its second hour of hurling itself against one of our tall windows in a match of wits with its reflection.

This writer witnessed the same thing:

[The thrush’s] incessant battles with its own reflection would seemingly wear out the bird as it energetically attacks the windows, then sits back as if attempting to figure another way to get to the rival that’s invaded its territory. It may then disappear for a few minutes or as long as an hour before returning to continue the one-sided battle – not realizing that its foe is really its own reflection.

Apparently this can go on for days.

The babies are out – ugly and gray,
with loose pink gullets and random
feathers. They’re surprisingly big.

The parents seem involved in a
perpetual feeding cycle. One
stands motionless on an edge
of the deep, papery, twiggy
nest — really, at this point,
after two weeks of rain, the
thing looks like rubbish, but it’s
held through all the storms — while
the other flies away. It returns in
minutes to deposit worms and flies
into the small mouths that make a
low buzzy sound — like crickets —
in excitement.

When I stand nearby, everyone
freezes. The mother’s huge liquid
black eye is unseeing. I’ve hung
a new bird feeder on a low branch
of the dogwood in the front yard,
in case the thrushes want a treat.

Sunflower chips
and dried
mealworms.

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The collages are the work of Randel Plowman.

Home again in Garrett Park after spells in Key West and Rehoboth Beach, UD finds in her garden among overgrown holly bushes a low-lying wood thrush nest with an anxious egg-sitting mother and an aggressively patrolling father.

The nest is ugly but clever, composed
of semi-circular twigs that form a deep,

well-rounded bottom, and, for connective
tissue, bits of white paper from human trash.

Having been dive-bombed, UD cedes this part of her backyard to the thrushes, and contents herself with watching through binoculars the big mother bird, the trembling nest, the tyrannical father. And although she misses the raucous chants of the Key West macaws, she knows she’s fortunate to have orchestra seats at the famous sound of the wood thrush.

… [T]he rich, liquid song of a Wood Thrush resonates through the morning air.

… [In the] moist and shady deciduous forests throughout the eastern United States, …the sensory experience of a walk in the woods is enriched by the flute-like sounds of the Wood Thrush. These sounds have inspired many lofty descriptions, such as this excerpt from the writings of a naturalist in the 1930’s:

“As we listen we lose the sense of time—it links us with eternity…Its tones…seem like the vocal expression of the mystery of the universe, clothed in a melody so pure and ethereal that the soul still bound to its earthly tenement can neither imitate nor describe it.”

Perhaps the most famous reference to the Wood Thrush’s song is this quotation from the writings of Henry David Thoreau,

“The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told…Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.”

The legendary “ee-o-lay” song of the Wood Thrush is actually a one-bird duet. Because the Wood Thrush has the equivalent of two sets of “vocal cords,” it is able to sing two overlapping songs at once. In other words, the Wood Thrush sings with two voices simultaneously. The syrinx, or voice-box, of the majority of bird species contains two membranes which when vibrated produce sound. The ability to control each membrane independently makes birds such as the Wood Thrush capable of impressive vocal gymnastics.

Immortal bird.

Sweet bird of youth.

Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and, more recently, Amy Clampitt have all had what to say about the thrush.

The Darkling Thrush, by Hardy, starts with the speaker entirely depressed at the thought of his exhausted civilization, a condition for which he finds a visual equivalent in his lifeless wintry scene:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

Only a poet would stand outside in such a deathly scene; everyone sensible is inside at a household fire. Those strings of broken lyres — a world once musical with beauty and life and meaning now violently broken off into silence — will recompose themselves in the throat of the thrush. But not yet. Next stanza will deepen and clarify the poet’s problem:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

The poet’s time is a dead time – war, social upheaval, spiritual confusion, the usual suspects, have made earth and the poet spiritless. But ahoy.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

A messy old thrush, his feathers mussed by the wind, nonetheless pours forth. If he can do it, goddammit, so can I!

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

In Whitman’s gorgeous When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, a threnody for Abraham Lincoln, the thrush sings a death carol that captures both the poet’s grief and his conviction of the country’s immortal soul: ‘The voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.’

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

… (Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses)…

Poetically, the Clampitt piece, A Hermit Thrush, is the least impressive. It’s a garrulous shapeless thing in which the poet worries here and there and everywhere about impermanence. But she’s got a way of talking about the thrush that pleasantly domesticates the high exotic note of the earlier poets. Here are some excerpts:

no point is fixed, … there’s no foothold
but roams untethered

Every summer she returns to a tree at the beach; every summer she worries it’ll be damaged or even washed away, but so far it’s still there.

aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as
in the end untenable.

This is your Buddhist buddy lecturing you on non-attachment as a solution to your worries. The poet finds it unpersuasive.

Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with
thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry’s cool poultice–
and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

So actually even though everything’s always changing (and what doesn’t get said here but what underlies the poem is our misery at our recognition that our changes, once youth passes, are all toward the grave), the earth every year rejuvenates itself, or if it doesn’t find youth again, it finds ways of mending and sustaining its life. And even those earthly objects that do die… you know…

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell…

Clampitt concludes:

we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive–
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human–there’s
hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.

Fragmentary and yet unbroken, the music of the thrush affects us because we intuit a link between its beautiful, inexhaustible — though diminishing — self-expression, and our own human assertion of ourselves in the world. We barely understand this world, but as we move through it we find ourselves — at first hesitatingly, later smoothly — in possession of an ever-renewed voice.

In order of thrill:

1. DRAGONFLIES
2. HUMMINGBIRDS
3. SONG OF THE THRUSH
4. FIREFLIES

Totally off the thrillist:

1. DEER
2. MOSQUITOES
3. THE PROFUSE ANONYMOUS BROAD LEAFY WEED(?) THAT’S NOW SIX FEET HIGH ALL OVER THE GARDEN AND HAS TO BE HACKED BACK EVERY DAY
4. GRAPE VINES

UPDATE: And who knew how lucky I am to see hummingbirds, dragonflies, butterflies, bees, and fireflies all the time?

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I’ve been seeing this guy – a male whitetail skimmer – all day. (Tried to take a pic but it wouldn’t sit still, so this is from Wikipedia.)

Nice writing about choosing the right vacation while still deeply mourning the sudden death of your husband.

As autumn approached, my parents agreed that it would be good for my mental health to skip my first holidays without Peter. “Let’s go on a trip,” my father said. “Anywhere but Asia or Australia. I don’t want too long a flight.”

“Let’s go to Peru,” I suggested. An avid bird-watcher, I had always wanted to visit the Tambopata region of Peru, home to the largest known clay licks on Earth. (A lick is a cliff where macaws, parrots, and parrotlets congregate to ingest mud, a vital source of sodium.) I can think of no more breathtakingly gaudy sight in the world. As our guide marched us through the jungle, day after day, in search of an ever-narrowing list of the area’s antbirds and antthrushes and flycatchers and manakins, I came to see the trip as avian psychopharmacology. It was a perfect, if privileged—and wet and buggy—way of avoiding the tinselled and ornamented triggers of the holidays.

I love to look at your garden. It’s so … blissful.

A young woman said this to me yesterday. She was walking her dog by my house.

I was standing on my toes, trimming the ragged top of a … what? I don’t know. I’m bad on identification. A honeysuckle tree?

The loppers cut blindly; I couldn’t see up there. Every few moments I stood back to see whether I’d gotten the tallest shoots.

Over the years I’ve sculpted this unexciting bush/tree at the edge of my front lawn. It anchors one end of my split rail fence. I’ve flattened the top and let the sides spread, and it’s become a dense respectable looking something.

Why is my garden blissful? Because I do think she found the right word. The other word a lot of people use is peaceful.

Well, it’s a green garden. Not eco-green (though with my absolute lack of chemicals I guess I get eco points); all-green-plants green (with very occasional touches of non-green). For inspiration on green gardens and what they can be, scroll through these images. And these.

You possibly think of Japanese gardens when you think of all-green gardens. My garden has stuff in common with Japanese gardens, and the peaceful, blissful vibe passersby pick up on is I think probably similar to what you feel strolling around landscapes in Kyoto, etc. (This example, however, is in Portland Oregon.)

I’ve got lawn. It’s weedy, but it’s a rich smooth calm expanse because it’s well-established and I mow it regularly. Motionless baby rabbits currently spend all day on it, eating white clover. There’s a massing in front of the house of rhododendron, viburnum, korean spice bush, butterfly bush, hydrangea (I guess I can do some identification), maybe boxwood (not sure; three large very sculptable bushes were here when we bought the house from the sons of Munro and Margaret Leaf, and I’ve planted around them). Lower down there’s hosta and liriope and vinca and ferns and ivies.

Our lot is very wide. On the other side of the lawn I planted pachysandra five or so years ago, and it’s now thick and beautiful. Looks sort of like this. Halfway submerged in it are our topiary bulls – an homage to the author of Ferdinand the Bull, who lived in our house. They look sort of like this, since we stuff them with moss rather than plant things on them. Even so, the pachysandra always makes its way up into the bulls. I snip the plants off. I prefer the way the bulls look mossed.

Whenever I see the word sphagnum on my bag of moss, I think of Cecilia Bartoli singing Rossini’s “Canzonetta spagnuola” — in my fevered mind, there’s some connection between spagnuola and sphagnum.

What else? Out front again, black river stones lie beneath another edge of the fence. I planted some small light green grasses in among them a couple of years ago, and they’ve come up well.

I like the combination of black and green. I could look at kiwi fruit all day.

The bulls are not my only non-organic element. In the middle of the lawn sit two brown butterfly chairs (our house looks very ‘fifties modern, so this seemed the right way to go), and between them, on a black metal stand, there’s a luxuriant yellow coreopsis spilling out of its (yes) black container. The only negative here, I’ve discovered, is that our many birds enjoy the plant so much that they congregate, and shit copiously, on the butterfly canvas.

Speaking of birds and rabbits – Anyone who reads this blog knows that UD‘s garden attracts insane amounts and varieties of wildlife. I chronicle the more dramatic viewings (hawks, a mink, big effing snakes) in these pages, and I inevitably feature more than anything else the ongoing surreal drama of ever-increasing deer families everywhere. I mean, they live on our property, behind the house, high up in the woods, and they’re just always here. But there are also hooting owls and barking foxes at midnight, and an orange cat who tries to kill all the birds, and turtles and voles and once I found a dead rat. Racoons and opossums go without saying.

Hovering threateningly above all of this are the trees. Very old, very big, very everywhere trees. Parts of them are always falling, especially during the violent summer storms. Right now a haul-away job awaits UD in the very thick of her woods, where, two nights ago, a bunch of pretty big branches came crashing down.

But anyway. The point is blissful. The point is peaceful. In sun and calm weather the trees benignly shelter UD’s carefully clipped, carefully planted green swathe. From a low-hanging branch she’s hung wind chimes she got in Bali, so there’s the pleasant low click of the cylinders in counterpoint with the wood thrush.

I think the blissful peaceful feeling comes ultimately from the ‘total world’ effect of all this green. There’s very little traffic, so it’s quiet; and the houses in every direction are, like this one, swathed in green. The houses are small, so none competes with the natural setting. I think at the moment all those soft silent rabbits in particular account for the way-Henri Rousseau feel of the place.

Two dead thrushes in two days on UD‘s deck! Both flew into our sliding glass doors. I think both were young… There’s always a bit of bird carnage out there – maybe four birds a year? – but I’ve never seen two of the same species on two consecutive days. And thrushes, with their famous song.

UD gets more interested in mushrooms each autumn. Her back woods, as you know, are all about dead trees, and she’s been delighted with her giant puffball crop and various less flashy fungi. Today she pulled from a tree what turned out to be a full shelf of oyster mushrooms which yes yes I know you can eat but UD is afraid to eat any mushroom she forages. She doesn’t trust her ability to identify them.

Mushrooms are very in lately.

A haughty orange cat has taken over UD‘s property. It always makes sure to be tramping around when UD‘s outside, and it stares insolently at UD, but refuses to approach. It has the look of a real predator, and UD‘s garden and wood, with its birds and rabbits galore, is just the thing. Today, as UD leaned on her rake (taking a break from dragging leaves curbside), she watched as the orange cat made sure UD was watching, and then shat in a stand of azaleas.

On the plus side, the cat took a long careful time covering up – with soil, leaves, and twigs – what it had done.

Another regular in UD‘s woods is the deer with one antler. I’ve watched this character year after year. Its dead antler never fell off; it hangs, a blackened fragment, off the side of its head. UD usually shoos away deer who get close to her house, but she has a soft spot for One Antler.

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UPDATE: Yikes. Were those birds gifts to me from the cat?

I do this every year.

I am instablogging the Garrett Park Maryland July Fourth parade, which goes right by my house, and how could it not, given the Lake Wobegone size of Garrett Park. It is now ten in the morning; the parade leaves the Garrett Park Elementary School grounds at 10:30. Wee UD graduated from the school, but back then GPES was a dull low-ceilinged brick dealie with cinderblock rooms… Two years ago they tore it down (the population in madly sought-after ‘thesda has grown insanely) and an actual architect vastly enlarged and rebuilt it, so now it’s all way-high skylights and winsome curving hallways and rainscaped gardens.

I have swept my storm-tossed front steps and driveway, I have swept even the street in front of my house (don’t want the floats wobbling on the branches that came down last night), and I have placed one of my deck chairs at the end of my driveway. From this very chair I will blog the event (assuming internet connection’s okay – after the storm we lost it for a few hours).

After a typically grim July morning, things have picked up out there sun-wise, and it’s not even stifling. There’s even a breeze.

UD is hoping her elderly Latvian neighbors will also be out watching the parade, because Les UDs recently got a rather elaborate letter from, er, Latgales Regionala Nodala (stick a bunch of diacritical marks on some of those letters) about their Latvian snail farm. (Longtime readers know that Les UDs own a Latvian snail farm. Another way of looking at it is that Mr UD inherited property, post-communism, from Latvia, because it had been owned by his family. And it isn’t an active snail farm; it is simply full of snails that someone imported onto the property long ago in the thought that the family might want to farm snails. Something like that.) Said letter includes photographs of their property plus official-looking language and stampings… Is the paltry tax they pay on the thing about to climb to fifty million dollars a year? UD is hoping her neighbors are willing to translate this document for her.

Okay, I’m moving my operations to my driveway.

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Internet connection so far fantastic. Cannot believe this is July and I am not sweating my guts out. A cool, breezy, sunny, morning.

Distant patriotic music!

And now, to my left, my down the street neighbor Peggy (I’ve known her for fifty years) puts out white folding chairs; and to my right – a big crowd of neighbors comes barreling down Rokeby Avenue… Looking for a prime viewing spot? Plenty of those, plenty of those… Like Lake Wobegone, we’re so small most of the townspeople are in the parade.

Hi Jack, says UD to her neighbor Jack.

I like the way you’re… [Jack mimics typing]

Someone’s got to blog the parade, says UD.

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Sounds of sirens!

Many dogs, mainly poodles.

Wind instrument: bugle?

Very loud siren – must be coming from the fire engine that heads the parade.

Bigger crowd than usual this year – good weather?

Flashing lights stage right. Here comes the fire engine.

Way loud sirens as the fire engine comes down Rokeby Avenue.

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Hokay. Much later. I managed to miss a good deal of the parade because a bunch of neighbors gathered around my chair and we all got to talking. So no real instablogging possible as UD learned of her neighbors’ new jobs, visits to Mexico, etc. UD also learned that the song she wrote for Garrett Park’s spring concert (a fund-raiser for a music scholarship) was – or so the event’s organizer claims – “a hit.” The musicale’s theme was Recycling, and UD put Garrett Park-related lyrics to Second Hand Rose. But she was at the beach when the concert took place. She had wondered how the lyrics went over…

Anyway. A good year for my town’s parade. Lots of kids, lots of clever takes on the parade’s theme: Garrett Park Through the Ages. UD‘s favorite thing: A bright red VW beetle convertible full of hippies. On the sides of the car were big white flowing letters that read LOVE PEACE HAPPINESS LOVE PEACE etc.

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Here’s what it’s like at 9:30 on the evening of the Fourth.

UD is lying down on the grassy hill halfway up her half acre. She is gazing high into the branches of her high old trees at three thrushes who are all very loudly singing their eerie thrush song.

Imagine the sharp harsh sound of the first high notes; imagine the strange low-throttle trill after that; and, after that, the famous ee-oh-lay. You lie there listening to them cycle through the three parts again and again, with variations…

The air is thick with fireflies.

From every direction, little local fireworks displays are popping and booming in your ears.

… when you live, as UD does, in the heavily wooded Washington suburbs, hard by Rock Creek. UD’s town, as longtime readers know, is Garrett Park, an arboretum, so all the birds hounded out of high trees by Bethesda development flock to our prolific, carefully tended, big old forest. Predators like owls love the birds, not to mention the rabbits and voles and snakes etc. The orange cat who shows up every afternoon and stands very still on a log alongside one of our woodland paths loves the birds too.

Spring means that all of this and much more (I just had to interrupt my writing to shoo a raccoon away from the trash container – I’m outside) is bursting. It’s Grand Central Nature on the acre around our little brown house, and I’ve spent today observing it.

At five AM we woke to the creaky song of the catbirds. They seem to have reproduced recently, and they and their offspring are buzzing the house big time. They were soon joined in song by the thrushes, whose voice is lovely and famous (one is supposed to feel privileged to have thrushes in the garden) but, as I’ve mentioned in seasons past on this blog, never-ending. Thrushes are loud and they don’t quit.

To my immediate right, in the upper branches of a honeysuckle, is a very active thrush nest, so we will be getting yet more thrush song.

All day rabbits have strewn the lawns front and back. I seldom see solitary rabbits anymore; it’s all coalitions.

Midday I was clearing one of the paths, and I heard a close-by and unfamiliar bird call. Suddenly a few feet away from me was a pileated woodpecker tapping a poplar.

Pleased to see a vine twining along one of our fences, I snipped a group of three leaflets to take them inside for identification. Good thing I was wearing gloves. Poison ivy.

Rotund bees press into the white azalea blossoms.

As I was cutting back the front yard azaleas this morning, one of my neighbors walked by. “Happy Mother’s Day, Margaret!” he called.

“Thanks, and the same to you!” trilled idiot UD. “I mean the same to your wife.”

A wood thrush sings on a high branch of a maple tree.

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When I walk by, a rabbit freezes over his patch of grass.

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The pileated woodpecker’s vocal placement is C above middle C.

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Here comes the woman who has trained five black spaniels to walk in military formation.

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The just-up sun lights the railings on my neighbor’s porch.

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I’m doing my first perimeter walk of the day.

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I’m deciding what garden work to do this afternoon.

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A robin perches on an orange butterfly chair.

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I’m manically happy.

UD is madly running about preparing the house for guests – she’s having a welcome to spring afternoon tea.

Here’s one of the teas she’s serving – a recent find at Plow & Hearth, where she also bought a new red deck umbrella, a new wreath for her newly painted front door, a new bird bath, and many other things to coincide with Les Soltans having finally gotten a serious contractor in to fix up Ferdinand House (Munro Leaf, author of Ferdinand, lived and died in UD’s house). Gord, said contractor, is in UD’s driveway right now, loading our large trash stuff into his truck, where Walter the yellow lab waits for him in the passenger seat.

We seem to have scored a spectacular spring day for our gathering (though it might rain later this afternoon). From where I’m sitting, the rhododendron’s scarlet is beginning to push through its big upright yellow buds. I can hear, from my back woods, the loud weird song of the thrush. I’ll hear it day and night, ceaselessly, all spring and summer.

This post is just nattering in place of the something more substantive I don’t have time for yet today. Later.

… “the most abundant and best studied bird in North America,” but this is the first time I’ve seen it around these parts. Pictures here.

What I mainly see around here are mourning doves, nuthatches, bluejays, robins, cardinals, wrens, starlings, grackles, owls, chickadees, woodpeckers, thrushes, catbirds, and hummingbirds. Never seen a red-winged blackbird before this afternoon.