The Carolina Wren

The Carolina Wren
[Written in 2000]
By MJB38
In the beginning, there was the song. It was quite beautiful. It was also loud, frequent, close by and totally new to us.
Nancy and I are casual birders. We stare through binocs at creatures that flit and soar. Our reaction is generally pleasurable awe, but all too often it is accompanied by complete ignorance. We sometimes remember to look up our sightings in our well-thumbed copy of Roger Tory Peterson’s guide to the birds of the Eastern United States. We sometimes find what we saw. We occasionally remember what we found.
This particular bird was singing outside the rear windows of our home in Truro, on Cape Cod, where we habitually put seed in a feeder and water in the concave lid of a plastic trash barrel (which serves no other function) on our deck.
But the volume made it appear as though the bird was perched on my shoulder and singing directly into my ear.
We commented on the beauty of the call, but at that point, in early May, we were in Truro only on weekends. It was several days - perhaps the next week - before we were able to spot the singer. It, too, was new to us.
He (we assumed it was male) was perched on our deck rail. He was small (under six inches), rusty brown, with a long, narrow tail that pointed up, and a long, narrow beak that pointed down. He had a white underbelly, and (what was most distinctive in this otherwise undistinguished-looking creature) two white stripes above his eyes, extending backward and forward along the head, from ears to beak.
We knew enough to turn to the page on wrens (page 214 in the 1980 paperback fourth edition) in Peterson. But just looking at pictures of the house wren, Bewick’s wren, marsh wren, sedge wren, rock wren and Carolina wren did not do it for us. They all fit the generic description offered by a British birdwatcher we once encountered in the Highlands of Scotland: LB Jays - “little brown jobs.”
Peterson’s description of the wrens’ calls, however, cinched it: Only the Carolina sings out “tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea-kettle, tea.” And that fit our bird, to a tea.
When June arrived, and we settled more regularly into our Cape Cod property, we noticed that the Carolina wrens had done likewise. They began their lusty teakettling every morning from dawn (about 5:15 at that time of year) right outside the sliding door that leads from our bedroom to the deck.
When we breakfasted on the deck, the wrens were there too, singing from the rail, regularly dropping down to the trash can lid for a drink or a cleansing swim, occasionally visiting the feeder and nibbling on oil seed (although the reference works tell us they are primarily eaters of insects and spiders, which are both abundant inside and outside our house), or grabbing a breadcrumb from underneath our table.
Unlike the finches, which fled at our approach, they were as fearless as chickadees or house sparrows, and would often hop along the wood deck, looking very much like Snoopy’s pal Woodstock, right past our feet, never flinching when we spoke or moved our heads and arms.
The hopping was as charming as the song.
We assumed the Carolina wrens were nesting nearby, since they spent a good part of the day in the immediate vicinity, occasionally foraging in the front garden.
And we noticed that when they hopped along our deck, they would hop off it at a particular spot.
So we looked underneath the deck and in the bushes and scrub pines growing up beside it, but never spotted a nest.
We saw no more than two wrens at a time (it was impossible for us to tell them apart), so we assumed the brood was not yet fledged. In fact (although we did not realize it at the time), it was not until the brood was almost fledged and the wrens were (in their way) packing up to leave that I staked myself out at a basement window and kept watch on the place on the deck above where the wrens generally hopped off. After about ten minutes one of the wrens hopped into sight, onto the rope of a buoy suspended by a nail from the deck, about three feet below the planking, and six feet above the ground. The bird then hopped onto the buoy, and disappeared. About a minute later, a wren flew off the buoy and into the tree with the feeder.
At that point, I emerged from the basement and took a good look at the styrofoam buoy, which had a wooden stick inserted through the plastic core. There are about 30 buoys hanging from our deck, every one of them authentic flotsam, combed from the outer beach after nor’easters.
This particular red-and-white buoy was chubbier than the rest, and smack in the center was a small, raggedy hole in the white styrofoam, from which the wren had emerged.
Only then did it dawn on us that the small white things we had seen the wrens carrying in their beaks were not bits of food being brought to a nest, but bits of styrofoam being removed from it.
It seemed a peculiar place for a nest, but later we learned (from a volunteer who answered the phone at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society) that Carolina wrens thrive in suburban and urban areas, and are celebrated for their lack of fear around humans. They also are known for their unusual nesting habits.
The volunteer (who didn’t offer her name) said a pair of Carolina wrens flew under the ill-fitting door of a neighbor’s garage and built their nest of grass and twigs there, inside the pocket of an old coat hanging on a hook, oblivious to the occasional comings and goings of the humans who also used the garage.
The map in our 1980 edition of Peterson’s guide indicated that Cape Cod was the northernmost limit of the Carolina wren’s year-round habitat, and some of the on-line birdwatching tabulations we consulted suggested that the bird is quite rare here. But the Audubon volunteer said Carolina wrens, like cardinals and other birds that had lived year-round in the southeast, were becoming more frequent fulltime residents of Massachusetts, because of the milder winters of recent years.
The Carolina wren is formally named Thryothorus ludovicianus. It does not regularly migrate, and it mates for life. In this part of the country, according to Gregory Gough of the U.S. Geologic Survey’s Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, pairs usually lay two clutches of four to eight eggs, which take up to two weeks to hatch, and another two weeks to fledge. This would account for the two months of nesting activity at our house, in May and June.
Although listening to the Carolina wren sing remains enjoyable (despite its volume) through many repetitions, the pleasure begins to pall after days of being woken by the song just after 5 a.m. On the day we discovered the nest in the buoy, Nancy, who is a light sleeper, was driven at one point to shout down to the wrens: “Too noisy! Go home!”
It was a sentiment she regretted the next morning when we both were awakened by the sounds of silence.
From the front garden of our house, not the rear deck, I heard one of the wrens tea-kettling in the distance. And then, when I came back from town with the mail and the newspaper, I heard the tea-kettling in the front garden, and saw at least four of the Carolina wrens flitting from low branch to low branch, moving outward from the garden, down the block.
There was silence on the deck all that day, and in the evening as we went out for a stroll near sunset, we heard one faint chorus of tea-kettling from down the block. We haven’t heard them since.
The Carolina wrens had moved on.
Nancy, of course, has moments when she suspects that she drove the birds off with her harsh words, and both of us are (literally) suffering from empty-nest syndrome.
[endit]

Beginnings

I spent a semester teaching journalism in Moscow in 1995. Each week that I was there, I posted a selection of my musings and experiences, including my personal activities and reactions to life in a quite different society, comments on politics and culture, my travels all around Russia, and media commentary. It was, I now realize, a blog before there were blogs, and I was a pioneer on-line journalist.
Now I am embarking on one of many million active blogs; I don't yet know what will be found here or where it will take me. Perhaps I will publish some writing that no one else wished to publish. Perhaps I will comment on the events around me and in the wider world. Or I may post some photos we took on our travels.
Like all blogs, this is a work in progress. We shall see.
MJB38