On Sunday, birder and multi-project Mass Audubon volunteer Warren Mumford was patrolling the dense, thickety woodlands along the Herring River in Wellfleet. These woods grew on what used to be marsh after the river was diked back in 1909, forming a tangle of craggy black cherries, doghair-dense stands of viburnums and blueberries, and briars and brambles – great habitat for migrating and breeding songbirds of various types. There, among a flock of a few dozen robins feeding on bittersweet and multiflora rose fruits, Warren found an unfamiliar grayish bird quietly watching him from the thicket. He snapped a few photos, correctly suspecting this was a rare visitor from the Rocky Mountain west that he needed to document – it was indeed a Townend’s Solitaire.
If you saw Warren’s photo, you would wonder what the fuss was about – a nondescript gray songbird perched on a branch – big whoop. But birders were instantly excited when his eBird post went public – there are less than 20 records of Townsend’s Solitaire for the Cape and Islands, so every one is special. It’s been almost 15 years since I’ve seen one around here.
They’re not just gray – their defining features include a thick, white eye ring and a big buffy wing patch visible on the folded wing but most evident in flight. Perched, they look like a drab female bluebird but with a longer, white-edged tail. You might also pass one off as a mockingbird around here – both are gray, long-tailed birds that you would find sitting in a thicket full of persistent winter fruits.
Townsend’s Solitaire is the only US representative of a group of mostly mountain dwelling thrushes of Central and South America, plus Hawaii somehow, and are some of my favorite birds. They are related to our bluebirds and robins but are better singers than both. The way you would normally encounter a Townsend’s Solitaire would be hearing this on a Rocky Mountain hike in summer.
The distinctive call sounds like a squeaky clothesline pulley.
My favorite solitaire songs are from a couple of species of Mexican and Central American highlands – check out the crazy crescendo of the Brown-backed Solitaire.
Or the ethereal beauty of the Slate-colored Solitaire.
Hearing these songs takes me back to times and places when I was more “adventurous, itinerant young biologist” and less “sedentary suburban dad”.
As for Townsend’s Solitaires, to find one around here it’s helpful to understand their normal winter movements in the Rockies, when they head downslope to lower elevation juniper woodlands, switching from a summer diet of insects to a winter diet of almost exclusively juniper berries. Though we are way out of their normal range, the Cape is loaded with juniper berries – what we call red cedar is a juniper, and they are laden with fruit this year. Robins, bluebirds, Yellow-rumped Warblers, and rare western visitors like solitaires or Western Tanagers all gorge on these gin flavoring fruits all winter long.
The Wellfleet solitaire was in many acres of fruit-laden habitat, so it may be a needle in a haystack situation to find it again. But you can bet birders will be there looking. Maybe you’ll even see me. I’ll be the bedraggled suburban dad with the two squabbling kids and the faraway look, daydreaming of a cool mountain forest somewhere in Mexico.
