Wings on the River: Snow brings thrushes

When the snow melts, they’re gone.

Though brightly ildfire-colored in burnt-orange and charcoal, they disappear into snow-free forests like smoke evaporating.

Their official common name speaks to their patchwork beauty: Varied means diverse, varigated, various. The male’s chest is orange with a pitch-black band, the female’s a paler orange banded in charcoal gray. Their song is a haunting, monotone trill, repeated at different pitches, echoing through their coniferous, high-elevation breeding grounds in the Cascades and along the West Coast.

My dad taught me another name for these secretive birds: Forest Robin. This folk name fit well: As the American Robins love the open lawns and fields, so the Forest Robins love tall, thick fir woods. When they land in the dull brown conifer forest, their blazing pumpkiny breasts and dull, dark backs suddenly just — disappear.

It seems counter-intuitive until you take a closer look at that patch of woods. Here’s a bright palm-sized fragment of sunlight on bright orange dead leaves; here’s a little charcoal shadow; here’s the exposed wood of a dead conifer branch in bright pale mushroom-orange. The forest is variegated.

And the burnt-orange leaf you’ve been overlooking? It’s a thrush who’s been sitting perfectly, absolutely, astonishingly still for the last three minutes. The bright bird blends in like a magic trick.

When they descend on our feeders in all their glory — scarlet-orange breasts flashing against the snow, ice crystals glittering on their beaks, the morning full of low trilling — it’s because they’re struggling, pushed out of hiding by hunger.

I live in Oregon White Oak habitat. After the Jan. 12 storm, an army of Forest Robins appeared. While the seeps and vernal streams still flowed, exposing earth in the bottom of small ravines, Forest Robins were digging for acorns and pounding them open. In summer, they fed on insects and arthopods from the ground and low bushes; in winter, they eat fruit and nuts. Good thing the acorn crop was full this year! But eventually the seeps began to freeze over.

The joy of watching a bare, whitened Oak become a Forest Robin Christmas tree was tempered by the knowledge that some of these twenty or thirty birds may not survive the storms. Cold, they can weather — but not insufficient food. And as our human world expands, every year, fewer thrushes fly back up the mountain to nest.

Vulnerable to logging, the Varied Thrush prefers to nest in forest patches bigger than 40 acres, often in a large tree surrounding by theit old nests. Populations decline by about 0.7 percent each year. That’s a 32% decline in this burnt-looking beauty over just a few decades. As long as the mountains keep wide swaths of forest, I can only hope the thrushes will keep appearing with glorious suddenness in every “big snow.”

They’re most of the reason I even like big snow.