Birding Western Mass: October Thrushes
Thoughts on Birding from the Quabbin to the Berkshires
Study Up
Thrushes are easier to tell apart if you’ve told yourself what to look for. What you looked for is easier to remember if you say it aloud while you’re looking. We do this all the time when we say aloud stuff like numbers to remember them.
Here’s an audio version.
While you are looking at the thrush, say to yourself what you see. Like, “okay, olivey-brown back, chestnutty tail, eye ring, uh, kinda can see the eye ring.”
The field marks I note for myself when I see a thrush are:
How speckled is the breast and how might I describe it?
Is there an eye ring, and if so, is it white, or more “buff”?
Is the eye ring unbroken or broken?
What color is the back?
What color is the tail?
What is the tail / back contrast?
Identifying thrushes is an exercise in considering these variables for most of us. This reddit thread is a good example of how the birder might think. In most thrushes’ cases, you’ll have your answer with the breast, the eye ring, and the back. If you hear it sing and you’re confident in their song, that will have solved it before you even see them.
Your #1 thrush from October 1 until mid-April will be the hermit thrush. That means from now (early fall) until early spring. Start there.
If it is a hermit thrush:
its eye ring will be visible but not vivid
its back and tail will be contrasting earth tones (tail lighter in tone)
its breast will be speckled but somewhat fadedly so.
(Among the more infuriating habits of birders’ ID rules is the inclination to compare to species unpresent; I am sorry and am doing the best I can to use absolutes that will benefit even the birder who is only looking at one bird. Be aware that there is meaningful variation geographically even within a single species, but that way lies the madness of the Cthulu cult. Stay with me; go not to R’lyeh.)
So, now you know whether you think it likely you have a hermit thrush. (Again, that’s an eye-ring, a speckled breast, and contrasting back and tail. Running or perching with a fairly horizontal habit, not juking around like a wren.)
Now:
Could it be a Swainson’s thrush? Swainson’s has a whiter eye ring and its tail and back do not contrast.
Could it instead be a wood thrush? Wood thrushes will get easy for you as you watch. They have the most speckled breast and the whitest background feathers for it; they are chestnutty brown on top, like caramel.
The vast majority of thrushes you see in October will be one of these three. (We are using the word “thrush” the way non-birdgeeks use the word; yes, American robins and bluebirds are also thrushes, but they aren’t these thrushes, looking all thrushy brown and running around in the leaf litter like a ripple in the winter light.) As it gets toward November, the chance that it will be something else drops to practically zero. That said, and if you’re reading this in spring or summer because maybe you are:
Veeries have weak eye rings and are a redder brown overall; they also do not contrast. (Once you’ve seen a few, they’re easy — the color is so different and so much closer to an orangey brown cinnamon cookie that you’ll be able to exclude them quickly. As of today, October 4, 2024, I know veeries are still popping the rare bird alerts, but that won’t happen much longer.)
It’s probably not a gray-cheeked thrush. But if it is, there will be no notable eye ring and it will be gray-brown all over. The tail and back do not contrast. Drab, drab, drab.
Bicknell’s thrush is grayer (says All About Birds, over a picture in which there is essentially no discernible color difference) and there is no eye ring worth taking note of. The only time I have seen these thrushes is in the high altitudes of the White Mountains, which are in New Hampshire, and therefore beyond the scope of this newsletter. Maybe you will see one down here, which would be frankly epic.
One of the key variables here is diet. Hermit thrushes can live on fruit in the winter. When I see them, it’s generally in mixed mini-flocks with juncos and other such birds. This flexibility gives them greater success through the coldest months here. When you see them in the Christmas count, a lot of time it’s in scrubby areas with berries.
Focus
Prove me wrong. I use this method sometimes when I am looking for rarities and enjoying the common birds. So, for example, I imagine all these are ring-billed gulls; prove me wrong. I then look for field marks that are counter to the gull I expect — checking size against the rest of the flock, and so forth. Anomalies you might be looking for this time of year will include looking for cackling geese among Canada geese, seeking out white-crowned sparrows among the white-throats, noting siskin flocks where goldfinch flocks are more common, detecting rusty blackbirds among the red-wings.
Birdscape
Yesterday, we went to the Dinosaur Footprints in Holyoke for ritual reasons. We weren’t the only people there to do tashlikh, interestingly — and other folks actually had a shofar that they sounded. Someone else bringing a shofar is pretty darn cool, actually. I hadn’t been to the footprints before. We had a few swans in the eddy, a turkey vulture overhead, and what I think was a moockingbird behind us in the scrubby growth. It’s an easy place to park, a gravelly walk downhill, and then the necessity that you cross the railroad tracks, which a bunch of signs remind you that you should not do, because it’s trespassing. As of now, the rock shelves are exposed; there’s plenty of room to sit on the crackling mud that coats them. It’s a wonderful place, even if you are a scofflaw for using it.
Bird Books and Whistles
It’s a stretch, I admit, but I recommend Dinosaurs Rediscovered. (It’s a stretch because while birds may be dinosaurs, dinosaurs may not be birds, exactly.) It’s a Venn diagram thing. You might not be interested in advanced mechanisms for understanding how fossils can be understood and processed. If you are, this will give you a look at how probabilistic analysis is changing paleontology same as it is everything else.
The Finch Forecast is in. TL;DR - no prediction of a great finch year, which is poor news for birders but good news for finches. A fella can hope.