“The Ring of Old Silver Lightly Dropped”

As a newcomer to the Roanoke Valley, I will not be convinced that winter is finally behind us until I hear the wood thrush sing.  For me, the wood thrush is the declarative voice of the forest, a harbinger of a green and fragrant woods, the archetypal neotropical migrant just back from Panama to mate and raise its young on the protein-richness of North America’s emerging insects.  It is a solitary, unhurried voice that seems right next door even when it’s a mile away.  When the wood thrush sings, I always stop in my tracks, my heart skipping a beat, straining to take in the full orchestration of this speckled little cousin of the American robin.

In 1935, American naturalist and author Donald Culross Peattie wrote An Almanac for Moderns in which he described the song of the wood thrush on 20 June: “Then it was that the thrush spoke to us out of the depths of the woods, a song inimitable by human syllables, but with the ring in it of old silver lightly dropped.”  Old silver lightly dropped.  What a breathtakingly accurate description of this bird’s unrivaled song!

When I was an undergraduate at VA TECH, my mentor John Trott and I had a friendly competition each spring about the first person to hear a singing wood thrush.  He lived in McLean on 13 acres of a thick mix of tulip poplar, white pine, oak, maple, spicebush, and holly with a little stream meandering through the property.  Though I lived much farther south in the Commonwealth than did John and his wife Lenore (and, thus, more likely to hear the bird first), John was an intrepid ornithologist and bird photographer who was often in the woods at the crack of dawn until late morning and then back out in the late afternoon until early evening.  Consequently, John often won the competition!

It was sometimes a near-spiritual struggle for me to be confined to class, listening to my economics or literature professor prate on and on about markets or a writing assignment, all the while knowing that the wood thrush was singing out its heart in nearby Jefferson National Forest.  That friendly competition between John and me endured for years until his sad death in 2000 and my move to Florida for a decade.  Wherever John’s spirit may be this spring, I’m sure he will note with inimitable and joyful accuracy the arrival of the wood thrush in Virginia, challenging Heaven’s angelic choirs to mimic its ensemble of flute-like phrases and guttural trills.

Here’s a poignant postscript, however, to my reference to John Trott.  Those 13 wooded acres where he and his wife lived in McLean are now gone, occupied by 12 McMansions on postage-stamp lots with hardly a trace of its previous avatar as a sanctuary for singing thrushes.  Imagine what angst these little neotropical migrants must have experienced when they returned that April to find uprooted trees, bare soil, and noisy bulldozers.  Given widespread habitat destruction throughout its winter range in Central America and its breeding range here in the United States, the wood thrush is often portrayed as a “poster child” for declining migratory bird species. According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey, the wood thrush has declined 1.8 percent per year since 1966 throughout its entire breeding range – more than a 70% decline here in Virginia since 1985!  I do not think that I’ll be able to walk confidently through our forests here in the Roanoke Valley unless I know they provide a safe haven for the wood thrush.

I will never hear the call of the passenger pigeon, globally extinct in 1914.  I will never hear the call of the presumably extinct ivory-billed woodpecker (though I did search for it vainly on an official American expedition into northeastern Cuba about eight years ago).  Will there come a time that I will never again hear the song of the wood thrush?  For me, such a travesty would bring down on our forests a winter-like pall that will forever haunt us for our poor stewardship of an ancient planet.

During the Civil Rights Movement, I was heartened by the collective voice of our various houses of worship to demand equality and justice for all our citizens.  Will those same houses of worship now speak out against our egocentric ruin of our country’s natural resources and instead promote wise conservation for the generations who will follow us?  The right to hear a singing wood thrush ought to be a right as inalienable as free speech.  It is truly the song of the American spirit flying wild in deep woods and swampy bottomlands.