Hermit Thrush

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Hermit Thrush

The Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) is a medium-sized North America

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
n thrush

Thrush (bird)

The Thrushes, family Turdidae, are a group of passerine birds that occur mainly but not exclusively in the Old World....
. It is not very closely related to the other North American migrant

Bird migration

Bird migration refers to the regular seasonal journeys undertaken by many species of birds. Bird movements include those made in response to changes in food availability, habitat or weather....
species of Catharus, but rather to the Mexican

Mexico

The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federalism constitutionalism republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of Mexico....
Russet Nightingale-thrush

Russet Nightingale-thrush

The Russet Nightingale-thrush is a species of bird in the Turdidae family.It is Endemism to Mexico.Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist montanes....
.

Description
This species is 15–17 cm in length, and has the white-dark-white underwing pattern characteristic of Catharus thrushes. Adults are mainly brown on the upperparts, with reddish tails.

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Encyclopedia

The Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) is a medium-sized North America

North America

North America is the northern continent of the Americas, situated in the Earth's northern hemisphere and almost totally in the western hemisphere....
n thrush

Thrush (bird)

The Thrushes, family Turdidae, are a group of passerine birds that occur mainly but not exclusively in the Old World....
. It is not very closely related to the other North American migrant

Bird migration

Mexico

Russet Nightingale-thrush

The Russet Nightingale-thrush is a species of bird in the Turdidae family.It is Endemism to Mexico.Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist montanes....
.

Description

This species is 15–17 cm in length, and has the white-dark-white underwing pattern characteristic of Catharus thrushes. Adults are mainly brown on the upperparts, with reddish tails. The underparts are white with dark spots on the breast and grey or brownish flanks. They have pink legs and a white eye ring. Birds in the east are more olive-brown on the upperparts; western birds are more grey-brown.

Behaviour

Their breeding habitat is coniferous or mixed woods across Canada

Canada

Canada is a country occupying most of northern North America, extending from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west and northward into the Arctic Ocean....
, Alaska

Alaska

Alaska is the largest U.S. state of the United States by area; it is situated in the northwest extremity of the North American continent, with Canada to the east, the Arctic Ocean to the north, and the Pacific Ocean to the west and south, with Russia further west across the Bering Strait....
and the northeastern and western United States

United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
. They make a cup nest on the ground or relatively low in a tree.

Hermit Thrushes migrate to wintering grounds in the southern United States

United States

Central America

Central America is a central geography region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmus portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast....
. Although they usually only breed in forests, Hermit Thrushes will sometimes winter in parks and wooded suburban neighborhoods. They are very rare vagrants to western Europe

Europe

Europe is, conventionally, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally divided from Asia to its east by the water divide of the Ural Mountains, the Ural , the Caspian Sea, and by the Caucasus Mountains to the southeast....
.

They forage on the forest floor, also in trees or shrubs, mainly eating insects and berries.

Song

The Hermit Thrush's song is ethereal and flute-like, constructed from a descending musical phrase repeated at different pitches. They often sing from a high open location.

Hermit Thrush in popular culture

The Hermit Thrush is the state bird

List of U.S. state birds

This is a list of U.S. state birds as designated by each state's legislature. The selection of state birds began in 1927, when the legislatures for Alabama, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Oregon, Texas and Wyoming selected their state birds....
of Vermont

Vermont

Vermont is a U.S. state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States United States. The state ranks 43rd by land area, , and 45th by total area....
.

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter Whitman was an United States Poetry of the United States, essayist, journalism, and humanism. He was a part of the transition between Transcendentalism and literary realism, incorporating both views in his works....
construes the Hermit Thrush as a symbol of the American voice, poetic and otherwise, in his elegy for Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," one of the fundamental texts in the American literary canon. This bird first appears in another canonical poem, Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." "A Hermit Thrush" is the name of a poem by the American poet Amy Clampitt

Amy Clampitt

Amy Clampitt was an American poet and author....
. A Hermit Thrush appears in the fifth section ("What the Thunder Said") of the T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

'Thomas Stearns Eliot', Order of Merit , was a poet, dramatist, and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Among his most famous writings are the poems The Love Song of J....
poem The Waste Land

The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a revolutionary, highly influential 434-line Modernist poetry in English by T. S. Eliot. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem ? its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of Narrator, Setting , its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and li...
.

Former Canadian indie-rock band Thrush Hermit

Thrush Hermit

Thrush Hermit was a Canadian alternative rock band active in the 1990s....
took their name from a reversal of the two parts. It is also shared by the American bands Hermit Thrushes and Hermit Thrush.

External links

- USGS Patuxent Bird Identification InfoCenter
- Cornell Lab of Ornithology
- South Dakota Birds and Birding