Hermit Thrush

About the Hermit Thrush

The Hermit Thrush is the quiet keeper of the winter woods - a plain brown bird with a spotted breast and a rusty-red tail it raises slowly and lowers again, over and over, as if thinking. It is the only one of the spotted Catharus thrushes that stays in the United States for the winter, and in Texas it is the one flicking through the understory from November to April.

It forages like a small robin, hopping and pausing on the shaded ground, flicking leaves aside for insects and taking juniper, yaupon, and possumhaw berries through the cold months. The soft, low "chup" from a thicket - like two pebbles tapped together - is usually the first sign of one.

On the northern and mountain breeding grounds the Hermit Thrush delivers what many consider the most beautiful song in North America: a single pure introductory note, then cascading, echoing flute phrases, each verse in a different key. Poets from Whitman onward have reached for it; winter Texans mostly get the memory and the occasional soft rehearsal on a warm February morning.

Hermit Thrushes winter across the southern two-thirds of Texas in any woodland with berries and shade - creek bottoms, juniper brakes, oak mottes, and brushy yards. Patient stillness near a fruiting yaupon usually earns a close, calm study of this most confiding of the brown thrushes.