Hear and there

Yesterday morning I heard the year’s first house wren. We moved to Keene last July, and I can’t recall if I heard house wrens then, but I know that one of the biggest differences between our old and present houses was the change in birdsong. When we lived in Hillsboro, our house was nestled on the edge of Fox State Forest, so I was in summer-time surrounded by the songs of woodland birds: vireos, ovenbirds, black-throated blue and black-throated green warblers, several kinds of thrushes (veery, hermit, and wood), scarlet tanagers, and, in winter, an occasional barred owl. On spring evenings, we could hear peepers calling from the bog across the street, and on spring mornings, an obstreperous male sapsucker would hammer his brains against our useless old rooftop TV antenna, the sound of loudly resonant metal reverberating like machine-gun taps through the entire house.

Every year our house in Hillsboro sported its own pair of nesting phoebes. The overhang from our screened back porch provided a perfect nook for nesting, so each spring and summer we were heralded by the sound of phoebes–first the adult pair, then their fledged young–calling back and forth, their sharp, clipped calls nearly as emphatic as their incessantly bobbing tails. On warm summer Sundays, our meditation group would sometime sit on the porch meditating to the sounds of calling woodpeckers and warblers and those resilient phoebes. At first the adults would hang back, perching pertly on our garden fence, tails bobbing, considering if they could safely fly to and from their nest with so many people sitting nearby. Eventually, though, the pair realized we weren’t moving, or at least we weren’t moving toward their nest, so they flew to and from their hidden nestlings with bills crammed full of insects and grubs, the babies’ shrill, thin shrieking silenced only when their mouths were similarly full.

We have phoebes here in Keene, but we don’t seem to have any nesting right around our house. Instead, this morning as I write I hear the sound of blue jays and traffic, cars passing to and fro on their way to work. Last summer we caught the tail-end of the mockingbird’s breeding season: although I don’t know whether they had nested near our house, I do know that we had several fledglings hopping about the yard in late summer, their petulant clucks for their food-laden parents echoing through our back hallway and into the kitchen where the dog paced and whined. Mockingbirds, of course, are hugely vocal: although only the males sing during breeding, both members of a bonded pair will defend their feeding territory come fall. On warm summer nights some particularly ambitious males will sing loudly in the darkness, perched on the highest spot they can find (like, for instance, a useless old rooftop TV antenna).

Yesterday’s wrens were courting. The male was singing his boisterously bubbling song; the female was inching about coying, chattering and wisping shrilly from the tops of our backyard shed. The male was both singing and displaying, landing on some eminence like a pruned tree-limb, our neighbors’ parked trailer, or a free-standing basketball hoop and then deftly raising and quivering his wings in a move that is supposed to drive Lady Wren wild. Lady Wren, alas, was unimpressed: the true proof of any manly wren is the nest sites he provides, for Lady Wren is choosy and will pair only with a male who has prepared several sites for her consideration. Our yard, it seems, has no prominent nest holes, no nest boxes, no rotted tree cavities: today, that male wren and his coyly calling lady have apparently moved on in search of more promising real estate, leaving in their wake a sad silence interrupted only by the chirping of house sparrows and the clucking of robins.

This is my contribution to the Ecotone biweekly topic, Sound of Place.