Length -- 7.25 to 7.5 inches. About one-fourth smaller than the
robin.
Male and Female -- Upper parts olive-brown, reddening near the
tail, which is pale rufous, quite distinct from the color of
the back. Throat, sides of neck, and breast pale buff. Feathers
of throat and neck finished with dark arrow-points at tip;
feathers of the breast have larger rounded spots. Sides
brownish gray. Underneath white. A yellow ring around the eye.
Smallest of the thrushes.
Range -- Eastern parts of North America. Most common in the
United States to the plains. Winters from southern Illinois and
New Jersey to Gulf.
Migrations -- April. November. Summer resident.
The first thrush to come and the last to go, nevertheless the hermit is little
seen throughout its long visit north. It may loiter awhile in the shrubby
roadsides, in the garden or the parks in the spring before it begins the
serious business of life in a nest of moss, coarse grass, and pine-needles
placed on the ground in the depths of the forest, but by the middle of May its
presence in the neighborhood of our homes becomes only a memory. Although one
never hears it at its best during the migrations, how one loves to recall the
serene, ethereal evening hymn! "The finest sound in Nature," John Burroughs
calls it. "It is not a proud, gorgeous strain like the tanager's or the
grosbeak's," he says; "it suggests no passion or emotion -- nothing personal,
but seems to be the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his
best moments. It realizes a peace and a deep, solemn joy that only the finest
souls may know."
Beyond the question of even the hypercritical, the hermit thrush has a more
exquisitely beautiful voice than any other American bird, and only the
nightingale's of Europe can be compared with it. It is the one theme that
exhausts all the ornithologists' musical adjectives in a vain attempt to
convey in words any idea of it to one who has never heard it, for the quality
of the song is as elusive as the bird itself. But why should the poets be so
silent? Why has it not called forth such verse as the English poets have
lavished upon the nightingale? Undoubtedly because it lifts up its heavenly
voice in the solitude of the forest. whereas the nightingales, singing in loud
choruses in the moonlight under the poet's very window, cannot but impress his
waking thoughts and even his dreams with their melody.
Since the severe storm and cold in the Gulf States a few winters ago, where
vast numbers of hermit thrushes died from cold and starvation, this bird has
been very rare in haunts where it used to be abundant. The other thrushes
escaped because they spend the winter farther south.