Outside My Window

Yesterday morning I stepped out on the front porch just after 6:00am to check the weather.  It was my first morning home from Maine and I was a little surprised that I didn’t need a jacket and the sun hadn’t come up yet.  What was I thinking!  Maine is certainly colder and it’s so far east that the sun rises there 45 minutes earlier than it does in Pittsburgh.  I had nearly an hour to wait for dawn.

As I gazed at the waning moon I heard a sound like spring peepers coming from above.  I knew the distinct solo “peeps” were the nocturnal flight calls of migrating thrushes, but which ones?

The pre-dawn sky was clear with a light wind from the north.  The birds kept coming with hardly a pause.  I rushed indoors to get my binoculars but it was too dark to see the birds.  In my excitement I forgot to count the sounds so all I can tell you is that they passed by steadily for 20 minutes.  My guess is there were several hundred of them. 

Later indoors, I checked my birdsong CDs and the Internet for samples of nocturnal flight calls.  I couldn’t find any audio examples – only voice-prints – but I looked through descriptions of various thrushes’ calls and found this at the All About Birds description of the Swainson’s thrush:  “Nocturnal flight call a “peep” similar to a single note from a spring peeper frog.”

So that’s who they were. 

I heard Swainson’s thrushes migrating this morning as well.  I wish I could have seen them.

(photo by Chuck Tague)

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