If you're interested in using any of these photographs in any way, please contact me. Send an e-mail to naturalhistoryphotos(at)gmail.com. Thanks!
Saturday, January 2, 2021
Looking back
It was a cloudy and wet day in Cotati today (2 January 2021). Rain often brings many birds to our backyard birdbath. This Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) came by several times, but I'll never get tired of her visits!
Thanks, Dan! Hermit Thrushes remain one of my favorites. I posted a few more photos of them back in 2012, along with a Rachel Carson quote that I love describing their songs --
"It was during those early evening hours that the sense of mystery that invested the island drew somehow closer about it, so that I wished even more to know what lay beyond the wall of dark spruces. Was there somewhere within it an open glade that held the sunlight? Or was there only solid forest from shore to shore? Perhaps it was all forest, for the island voice that came to us most clearly and beautifully each evening was the voice of a forest spirit, the hermit thrush. At the hour of the evening's beginning its broken, silvery cadences drifted with infinite deliberation across the water. Its phrases were filled with a beauty and a meaning that were not wholly of the present, as though the thrush were singing of other sunsets, extending far back beyond his personal memory, through eons of time when his forebears had known this place, and from spruce trees long since returned to earth had sung the beauty of the evening."
4 comments:
Lovely photo of a shy bird with a golden voice. I love their song. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks, Dan! Hermit Thrushes remain one of my favorites. I posted a few more photos of them back in 2012, along with a Rachel Carson quote that I love describing their songs --
https://bodegahead.blogspot.com/2012/10/forest-spirit.html
"It was during those early evening hours that the sense of mystery that invested the island drew somehow closer about it, so that I wished even more to know what lay beyond the wall of dark spruces. Was there somewhere within it an open glade that held the sunlight? Or was there only solid forest from shore to shore? Perhaps it was all forest, for the island voice that came to us most clearly and beautifully each evening was the voice of a forest spirit, the hermit thrush. At the hour of the evening's beginning its broken, silvery cadences drifted with infinite deliberation across the water. Its phrases were filled with a beauty and a meaning that were not wholly of the present, as though the thrush were singing of other sunsets, extending far back beyond his personal memory, through eons of time when his forebears had known this place, and from spruce trees long since returned to earth had sung the beauty of the evening."
Oh, man. The Carson description carried me away. It was almost as beautiful as birdsong.
Your post brings to mind this poem by Robert Frost
Come In
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.
—Robert Frost
Post a Comment