Essay: July 29

From Blue Ridge Country (September/October 1998)

7/29/98

The Price of Wood Thrush Song

by Elizabeth Hunter

Two summers ago, my days began with the raucous sound of earth-moving equipment rumbling to life a stone’s throw from my door. It was the worst summer I’ve spent on this acre of Blue Ridge. The crack of tree trunks shattering and the scrape of metal against bedrock assaulted my ear, and I developed a visceral loathing for big yellow Caterpillar equipment of the sort a contractor’s crew was using to bulldoze a road along two sides of my property.

The road was a means — unnecessary and ultimately abandoned — not an end. Materials needed to keep the North Toe River from undermining the CSX railbed could have been brought down the tracks. But the contractor opted to build a road down a ravine that water had spent tens of thousands of years carving down the hill from my house. The water continued its ceaseless work all that rainy summer, and eventually the contractor acknowledged defeat and pulled his equipment out.

He left behind an ugly, churned mass of mud, splintered trees, a scar on the landscape I’m sure he’s long since forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s a policy he forced me to adopt, at least with regard to the road. Before he came, I’d hiked down the ravine hundreds of times, armed with a machete to combat near-impenetrable tangles of blackberry and multiflora rose. But like the contractor, I’ve abandoned that way to the river. It still infuriates me to look at the damage an excess of horsepower and a dearth of brains can inflict on a hapless hillside.

I first tried to walk down the road on a sunny summer afternoon a couple of weeks after the project began. Water from the previous day’s rain pooled in the muck; in a heartbeat, you could sink to your knees. Ahead of me, a wood thrush hopped through the quagmire on a similar inspection tour. Like me, it had inhabited the ravine years before the yellow earthmovers arrived. Like me, one look was apparently enough, because I heard its song no more that long summer or fall. When I bought my mountain cabin, I was unfamiliar with what Robert Frost calls “thrush music.” I first remember hearing it a few years after I moved in, when my friend Elise and I were sitting on the back porch after supper. There may be a more beautiful song on earth, though I don’t know what it might be. (Would that a magazine’s pages could absorb sound like scent, and we could bind it into this issue for you.)

None of us knew what bird was singing, but we listened to that unearthly voice repeating its three haunting, widely spaced phrases until the light drained from the world and it was dark. Elise sent me a cookbook as a thank you for putting her up, but the better gift she gave was the bird’s name. She described the song to her grandmother, who knew instantly what it was. “Wood thrush,” she telephoned to tell me. A thrush sings at dawn and dusk; is more often heard than seen, living, as Frost says, “far in the pillared dark.” It summers in the eastern U.S., and winters from Mexico to Panama. In Birds of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it’s listed as a “common summer resident from mid-April to mid-October in medium to mature deciduous and mixed forests up to 4,500 feet.”

Common now — but probably not for long. Wood thrush numbers have declined by a third since 1966, a decline linked to habitat loss here and in its wintering grounds. Contributing to the loss there are changes in the way that coffee is grown. The old kinds of coffee trees had to be shaded by a canopy of taller trees to keep their leaves from burning. But new sun-tolerant varieties — which produce more coffee in less space — have been developed in the last 20 years, leading to widespread conversion of shaded coffee groves to densely planted “sun plantations.” Numbers for neotropical migrant songbirds like the wood thrush have plummeted during that time. Far fewer species find the sun plantations habitable after the high canopy and fruit trees have been removed. Scientists believe the proliferation of sun plantations and the decline of songbirds are connected.

The wood thrush the contractor’s crew banished from my woods lived on land that surrounds mine, owned by someone else. Our mutual habitat was disturbed without my (or its) permission, and for the months that followed the roadbuilding, I felt powerless and angry. Above all, I feared the thrush would never come back.

But the next spring it did. Thrush music greeted me on April 22 that year, and even earlier — on my birthday — this spring. It was the best birthday gift I could have gotten, sweeter even than the homemade maple syrup my mother sent from Vermont. Sometime last winter I started noticing stories about shade-grown coffee and began looking for it. About the time the thrush returned, I found a line of “Sanctuary” coffee in an Asheville grocery store. The price made me suck in my breath. It was expensive — several times the price-per-pound of sun-grown supermarket brands. I hesitated.

But somebody has to pay for the things that weren’t in the bag — that shelter in the limbs of old-fashioned, inefficient, generously proportioned trees. That somebody needs to include me. I learned the price of wood thrush song during the summer of the road. A red-eyed vireo — another migrant songbird who summers high in the canopy above the road’s disfiguring scar — lifts his sweet voice in a song my Birding-by-Ear guide transliterates as “Here am I. Where are you? Here am I. Where are you?” The question echoes through the woods dozens of times each day. “Monotonous,” the Peterson guide says, but it isn’t.

I listen — and hope we never have to turn that question around. Or ask ourselves why we didn’t notice, until it was way too late, that shade-grown coffee was cheap at any price, the biggest bargain in town.