The Sound of Happiness
Posted May 19th, 2006 at 10:06 pm in Birding
This evening, while checking my email, the Common Poorwills were singing so loud I could hear them inside the lodge. Just a little reminder that I’m in the right place.
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Sorry for the lack of blogging. I’m keeping real busy as I try to set up my transects out here in the Davis Mountains. I should have some stuff up soon though, including pictures.
When I lived in Connecticut, the sound of wood thrushes and veeries in the evening gave a sense that all is right with the world.
Even though (like the Poor-Will) the sound is rather sad, the sound of a Hermit Thrush singing as evening would fall in the SE Arizona is perhaps the most beautiful sound I have ever heard. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” (an elegy for Abraham Lincoln) characterizes the Hermit Thrush’s song as the “song of the bleeding throat.”
IMO, both the wood thrush and hermit thrush beat the nightingale, which I often heard in Kiev.
Oh, and if we’re sticking with nightjars, the sound of whipoorwills near my bedroom window in Missori when I was a kid is a great soporific.
Funny, I never hear them anymore when I visit Missouri.