The Music of the Dawn Chorus

The night is not usually silent, but sometimes it seems that way. In June the amphibians no longer croak or peep or trill incessantly, and the mid-summer buzz of cicadas has yet to begin. Rise from your bed in the dark or, even better, sleep in the woods some June night. If you are far enough from roads or airports you will first hear the silence, and then the dawn chorus.

Those birds that sing at dusk will also be the first to begin, the glorious thrushes. The soulful hermit thrush may send his pure haunting notes slowly into the stillness. The playful wood thrush may pipe his sprightly tune. The insistent veery may cast abroad his fluted sounds to fall down the scale into our ears. All this may happen, but what will surely happen is the robin will sing - and sing - and sing some more.

The American robin is a thrush, and even more surprising to many, it is a woodland thrush, not normally a resident of lawns and fields. It is common throughout the North American continent wherever there are at least a few trees. It has reached out from it forest origins to greet the intruding settler at his doorstep, forgiving him the thinning of the trees.

So wherever you are, expect the robin to be the first to greet the light of an approaching sun, and not just one or two robins. The dawn chorus is truly an effort of many voices, and you will be amazed at how many robins there really are in every neighborhood, or in the dark forest. As you walk along during the day you might see one or two and come to think that they are spread thinly over the land. But it is not so.

They are packed in as tightly as possible, each pair filling every small parcel of trees and openings, shoulder to shoulder and beak to beak. This is why you can depend on their song every day. The neighboring robin has to be told to keep his distance and stay in his allotted space. The more birds you have, the more they will sing.

After the thrushes start, then other species chime in. If you are in the woods, as we were last week in a campground on Mt Greylock, the wildest, broadest, tallest, mountain in Massachusetts, then you will hear the warblers of the spruce-fir forest.

Walking down the campground road, with the straight, stately northern evergreens around you, you will hear more treetop warblers than anywhere else in the state. This is their Massachusetts stronghold, and they are packed in like the robins, beak to beak. This is why they sing so steadily and long.

There are many places in the state where such warblers nest, even in the hills of Hampden County, but you will not hear such incessant song as on Greylock. There are a few blackburnian or magnolia warblers here wherever hemlock or pine are thick and tall. However, there are not enough birds to fill the space, so they have a lowered urge to sing. Why sing when there are few to challenge or reply?

They need each other to do their choral best, and best each other with ever louder and longer renditions of the score. Scoring is everything when there are many eggs that hatch into many mouths, each clamoring for the few worms and bugs in their parents chosen patch of woods. If there is none to answer, then time is better spent searching for food and feeding the young.

But the minutes before dawn are always best spent singing, since food is hard to find in the semi-light. So before dawn, even the woods where only a blackburnian warbler or two is resident will ring with their song. Other warblers, thrushes, and flycatchers join in then, and the chorus is complete, even if for a shorter time.

But when many birds of the same kind are nesting close, then the music rises to heights that may reach the moon and swell it to full shining. That night on Greylock the moon was swollen, setting as the birds were rising. Even a sleepy ear would welcome such an earthly choir. To hear it, all you have to do is rise early, or sleep out and wake early.