Look and Listen for the Winter Wren

There is an animal whose image adorns greeting cards and note paper in cute and friendly poses that give you a warm fuzzy feeling. The actual animal, however, is perhaps one of the most feared creatures on earth, hunted and trapped without mercy whenever it appears where people dwell.

Perhaps we feel bad about the mice we kill in our homes and wish they would be the harmless house mouse companions they appear to be in those commercial designs. It would be so much nicer to tame them rather than smash them in traps, lure them to agony with poison bait, or send the cat to torment and devour them

Of course, some folks do keep mice as pets in cages. They like seeing them burrow through litter and tunnels or hearing them run forever in squeaky wheels. A wild mouse gnawing in the walls, however, will unhinge a homeowner completely. Perhaps I can offer a different animal as the image of the fuzzy friend, the petite and lively wren.

The wren is as secretive and swift as a mouse, and cuter by far. It comes in three versions in our area, each as inquisitive and bubbly enough to bring a smile to your day. One version even wears the name 'house,' although it will never enter your home and wander through your walls.

The most common version is the house wren, who often breeds in wooden boxes we set up in our yards and will entertain you for hours carrying twigs to build the nest and bugs to feed the young through the little entrance hole. This wren is gone south now as winter approaches, and mice may actually have moved in to that wren box and built their own nest.

It is likely that mice may leave the frosted grass of your yard and enter your homes now. More welcome is another wren that may visit your feeder by day and roost nightly under a porch all winter. This is the Carolina wren, who, like his cousin the house wren, always seeks out dark cavities in which to hide.

Then there is the quintessential wren, the one that I have been wanting to tell you about from the start, the cutest of them all and most mouselike, the winter wren. This littlest of wrens has darker brown barring than the house wren, with only a darling stub of a tail that always sticks straight up.

In the mountains where this wren lives most of the year, it will find the hunter's camp a lovely place to make a home, creeping in though a small hole and roosting away the winter in a warmer woodpile. This would be in southern forests where snow is less likely to fill the crevices beneath rocks and fallen logs where the wren would find plenty to eat.

The winter wren must leave the northern mountains now, when the north wind blows and the snow falls. You must search it out in tangles and weedy patches on forest floors along the brooks and rivers of southern New England. In the last few weeks in such secret tangles near my house, the winter wren's happy chatter has sounded out several times.

If you stand still, you can watch the little bird hop and teeter on the logs and leaves, more mousy and cute than any image in your mind. Like other wrens, it gives out a series of gentle scolding notes when agitated, but then slowly settles back down to scour the ground for food.

This wren is reluctant to fly far, preferring to keep low and out of sight, but always on the move. It does a bouncy dance, exercising the short, powerful legs that propel it everywhere. Whenever it stops walking, the bird will bob up and down in a frenzied rhythm, nearly toppling over headlong in the effort.

When alarmed, it will venture into the open a bit and dance for you, but soon will dive back into cover, disappearing in the shadows as if it was the merest shade itself. This is the kind of creature you can illustrate and celebrate in art and story, adorning your note papers with its enchanting image.