Night Warbling

Friend-of-blog Geoff Wisner has a new book coming out. Pre-ordering it at this link saves you money and supports the Thoreau Society, not that nasty plutocratic emperor of Amazon.

The book gathers a large sampling of Thoreau’s many writings about birds over the years and organizes them through a single calendrical year. This will doubtlessly include the day he first trained his telescope on birds, a notable moment in the history of bird-watching. Because, let’s admit it, birds are generally small and far away, and some optical enhancement really makes a difference.

Thoreau was long puzzled by the identity of what he called the night-warbler. It first made an appearance in his journal on June 11, 1851: “I hear the night-warbler breaking out as in his dreams.” I think most people who have looked into it since think it was the aerial song of the Ovenbird. Emerson urged him not to ever identify it so that the mystery would always remain. In August, 1858, Thoreau wrote that he heard his “night-warbler note” and “Looking through the glass, I saw that it was the Maryland yellow-throat!” So it may have been more than one species. Oh, for a sonogram, eh?