Saving a Rare Songbird
Each spring, across a small section of North America, dawn comes with an event witnessed nowhere else on Earth. It happens in a zone of mountainous and coastal forest sites scattered across southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States. As the day begins, these forests come alive with the swirling song of the Bicknell’s Thrush. Arriving after a 2,000-kilometer migration from wintering grounds in the Greater Antilles, the thrushes will breed and raise young in these forests, not far removed from population centers with millions of people. A scant four months later, they will depart and migrate south before the onset of winter. With each journey, north or south, Bicknell’s Thrush flies toward an uncertain future.
That’s an excerpt from a summary document I helped to prepare for the International Bicknell’s Thrush Conservation Group. The IBTCG just released A Conservation Action Plan for Bicknell’s Thrush. The plan’s four-page summary (400K PDF) offers a concise account of the threats and conservation actions planned for this amazing songbird. Please read it. Here’s my image of a Bicknell’s Thrush on a nest on Vermont’s Mount Mansfield.
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I’ll blog on thrush songs next spring. But you can rule out Bicknell’s Thrush unless you’re on a mountain above 3000 feet or so in elevation.
How about a recording of the song? All through May, I hear an ethereal thrush songs at the break of dawn but I never see the birds and don’t know whom to give the credit.