Ode to an Ovenbird

The autumn bird migration continues apace. Our front porch provides premium seating for watching the flypast of warblers, sparrows and thrushes. They head south, sometimes landing in the mountain-ashes and mountain hollies to feed on berries or bugs. The migration does not stop at night; it proceeds unseen but not unheard. I lie awake eavesdropping on snippets of clipped conversation as birds seek their way by starlight wherever they are intent on going.

I contemplate the perils the birds face. Weighing just a few grams, a warbler must nonetheless be formidably, unfathomably robust. How else do they manage to cross the Gulf of Mexico to reach South America in one piece? Once, twenty miles out at sea en route to Nova Scotia’s Seal Island to—what else?—go birding, I was amazed to see hummingbirds pass the boat, terra firma nowhere in sight.

It isn’t always peaches and cream. Yesterday an ovenbird, doubtless on its way to wintering grounds in Latin America, crashed into the cabin, killing itself right in front of Jan’s startled gaze. An ovenbird is a lovely thing to behold, preferably when alive. It is a warbler that looks like a thrush. It is the bird of summer sometimes called ‘teacherbird’ due to its song: typically rendered by us humans as teacher-teacher-teacher. We hear them every day in June and July and are glad of it.

Ovenbirds are generally olive-brown but boast a handsome dark-bordered orange crown. They use their pale pink legs to walk rather than hop as most passerines do. Why do we call them ovenbirds? Because their nest, unique among Nova Scotia’s woodland nesting birds, has an arched roof suggesting a Dutch oven. All in all the ovenbird is a real charmer: we count ourselves lucky whenever we see one, less so when it is freshly dead.

Years ago I remember being appalled by a piece in Birding magazine reporting the toll exacted by a single tall telecommunications tower somewhere in Pennsylvania. During one fall migration the author occupied himself each morning in tallying the feathered dead at the foot of the tower—a great variety of migrant songbirds. What I particularly recall is one morning’s count of dead ovenbirds: more than eleven hundred.

There can be no doubt that autumn migration was always perilous for birds, even before the world needed cellphone towers , wind generators, high-tension powerlines and 80-storey glass-and-steel highrises. Not to mention millions of beloved domestic cats going about their outdoor entertainment. Scientists report continuing year-after-year declines in populations of neotropical passerine birds. Small wonder.