Canyon Wren

About the Canyon Wren

The Canyon Wren has the best voice in the desert Southwest - a silvery cascade of clear whistles tumbling down the scale, echoing off rock walls and seeming to pour straight out of the canyon itself. The singer is a small rusty wren with a gleaming white throat and chest, a flat head, and a remarkably long, slightly curved bill.

That bill and a specially flattened skull let the Canyon Wren reach deep into rock cracks for spiders and insects; it hunts vertical stone the way a creeper hunts bark, hitching up and down cliff faces and boulder piles with big, spring-loaded hops. It is rarely seen far from rock, and like the Rock Wren appears to get all its water from its food.

Pairs hold canyon territories year-round, and the male's song carries so far that hikers regularly hear a bird a quarter mile up-canyon. Where the two rock-loving wrens overlap, the Canyon keeps to the sheer faces and shaded grottoes while the Rock Wren works the broken rubble.

In Texas the Canyon Wren is a resident of the rocky country from the Hill Country westward - river canyons, cliff faces, and boulder fields, including the limestone gorges of the Highland Lakes. The song bouncing off the rock at places like the upper Colorado canyons is one of the signature sounds of wild central Texas.