photos by Jigna Patel
Sometimes wildlife adventures happen too close to home. Saturday, a Hermit Thrush crashed into my neighbor’s window.
I found the thrush sprawled out on the ground, conscious but barely moving. Gently, I picked up the small, nearly weightless bird and cradled it between my hands to warm it and alleviate the shock. I was about to place it in a small box, and leave it in a quiet place, away from pets and predators, for 15-minutes. This is the recommended treatment for window-stunned birds. But before I could transfer it to the box, I lifted one hand, and the thrush stood up on the other. It perched briefly before fluttering to the ground under a nearby shrub. There it stood motionless. My neighbors and I watched the bird closely, ready to fend off cats.
An hour later the thrush flew up to the fence, then across my yard where it eagerly ate Evergreen Huckleberries. It had recovered!
Hermit Thrushes breed in the coniferous forests of the Cascade Mountains and winter in the Puget Sound lowlands in areas with berries and dense brush, like our native-plant landscaped back yard. Their name derives from their reclusive lifestyle of foraging for insects and berries on the forest floor. The song of the Hermit Thrush is so hauntingly beautiful that David Sibley, author of The Sibley Guide to Birds regards it as his favorite.
Our revived thrush will hopefully be singing its resonant flute-like tones in the Cascade Mountains in the summer of 2011. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website has good information on how to prevent bird/window collisions and what to do after they occur: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=1184
