May 2022 Brooklyn, N.Y., Bicknell’s Thrush
Doing my best to give this elusive woodland songbird the respect it deserves.
“Long wrapped in mystery.”1 “Inhabits areas that humans do not.”2 “Field recognition is not encouraged.”3
Bicknell’s Thrush is a near-mythical bird among those who have even heard of it. This plain denizen of woodland floors and alpine forests, with its brown back, white belly, and spotted chest, is difficult to find during migration and is notoriously similar to its close relatives in the genus Catharus. It’s nearly indistinguishable from Gray-cheeked Thrush — in fact, Bicknell’s was considered a subspecies of Gray-cheeked until 1995.4
“Bicknell’s Thrush is considered by some to be identifiable in the field,” Robert Z. Dobos stated optimistically in a 1997 Ontario Bird Records Committee report, “given excellent viewing conditions and familiarity with other thrushes.”5
I encountered a range of familiarity among one Bicknell’s Thrush’s admirers at Prospect Park on May 21, 2022, when I went to see one who was hanging out near the Dongan Oak monument. (It’s more or less only identifiable during migration by song — I didn’t hear it sing, but other birders before me had.)
A birder who had heard the reports had scrambled to come catch a glimpse of the continent’s most elusive Catharus when he heard it was still being seen. Maybe he had assumed, like I had at first, that the bird had retreated into the woods after showing well earlier that morning — this species is typically crepuscular, most active around dawn and dusk, but it was still active when I left around noon.
Two other birders, a couple from Kansas visiting their grandchildren in Brooklyn, were excited to see the bird after I told them what it was. Like them, the bird was only passing through the city. They hadn’t heard of it — it wasn’t in their usual field guides, and they were probably busy being parents when it was recognized as a full species.
A family on a Saturday morning walk asked what I was looking at. I did my best to try to describe what made the bird special without going overboard, and the parents showed their young children the little brown bird hopping in the leaves. (They thought at first that I was saying “Big-nosed Thrush;” I had to show them the Merlin app to clarify.)
Though at first it seems visually unremarkable, there’s something about this bird that captivates. I can’t describe exactly what it is, but everyone I talked to (non-birders included) paused to genuinely appreciate the bird.
Maybe it’s the big eyes. Catharus thrushes have always struck me as deeply earnest creatures — when one looks at you with its head tilted half-sideways, it gives an impression of genuine curiosity. More practically, those eyes are an adaptation to the shady forest understory they inhabit; larger eye size may also allow birds to be more active in the low-light hours of the early morning and late evening.6
Their behavior is also endearing — cute, even. I watched this one hop on top of logs, bounce along the forest floor, pluck bugs from tree bark, and rummage through leaf litter looking for bugs like someone searching for a T-shirt at the bottom of a laundry basket.
It could also just have been knowing how rare it is. A 2017 study estimated its global population at under 120,000 individuals; at the time of writing, it has been recorded not quite 8,700 times on eBird. Gray-cheeked Thrush, its more-common-but-still-cryptic cousin, has 16 times as many records at around 145,000; the most common North American Catharus, Hermit Thrush, has about 1.8 million.
For birders, elusiveness is a big part of the appeal of a rare species, and it doesn’t get much more elusive than Bicknell’s Thrush. The bird is typically “shy and retiring, often retreating to dense cover when approached”7 — but this individual wasn’t feeling timid at all. It was far from reclusive, coming right down to the path. (Ryan Mandelbaum, who saw the bird earlier that day, got better photos of it than I did; my camera doesn’t handle shade well.)
I didn’t try to approach the bird very closely, but it didn’t mind approaching me. I crouched on a hillside path, leaning against a tree, and the bird hopped to within a few yards of me on multiple occasions. Like I often do when watching a bird up close, I thanked it for letting me admire it.
One other thing at the back of my mind was the thought that I should appreciate this bird while it’s still here. Not just this individual bird, which did move on a couple days later, but the species of Bicknell’s Thrush. It might not be reasonable to worry that they’ll go extinct in my lifetime —the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided in 2017 that the species shouldn’t be listed under the Endangered Species Act, and the International Bicknell’s Thrush Conservation Group hopes to increase the species’s population by 25% in 50 years. But I still worry. Their incredibly specific habitat preferences, limited range, and small numbers make them vulnerable to habitat destruction and climate change.
It’s known to winter on just five islands in the Caribbean: Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. It’s at least as vulnerable to habitat destruction and difficult to study there as it is on its North American breeding grounds, where it relishes habitats disturbed by frost, fire, and wind. It has a particular preference for alpine forests of twisted spruce and fir trees in the high-altitude krummholz zone. Some birds have found success in areas disturbed by human activities, but in general, habitat degradation is a major threat to the species. (For more about its breeding habitat, including breathtaking photos of misty Catskill trails, check out Tim Healy’s account on Nemesis Bird of hiking up to the summit of Slide Mountain, the place where Bicknell’s Thrush was first described to Western science.)
For whatever reason, I spent about an hour with the bird trying to give it the respect it deserved. Sure, it was a life bird for me and I wanted to appreciate the sighting, but I also felt like I was close to something ancient. In the only forest left in Brooklyn, this Bicknell’s Thrush was resting on its way to some open-air cathedral on a mountaintop in the northern Appalachians.
I did my best to take in the details of its plumage — its half-yellow bill, its precisely mottled chest spots, its wing and tail feathers that blended in with the gray shade but warmed to a more rufous shade in sunlight — and thought about how its name didn’t really live up to the bird.
Eponyms like the “Bicknell’s” in Bicknell’s Thrush are generally problematic — they often memorialize people not worth memorializing, and they also don’t say anything worthwhile about the bird itself. Eugene Bicknell wasn’t responsible for anything reprehensible, but this thrush still deserves a more dignified name — a name that shows it the same respect it inspires when seen in the field.
I tend to like tree-based names for birds previously named after people — the proposed renaming of Scott’s Oriole to Yucca Oriole, for example. The bird currently known as Bicknell’s Thrush isn’t associated with a particular species of tree as much as it is with a particular habitat: that krummholz zone of stunted forest at the mountaintop tree line. An English synonym for the German term offers a name that I think has a nice ring to it. How about Elfinwood Thrush?
It’s hard to explain exactly how to someone who hasn’t seen one, but a bird like this thrush inspires a sort of reverence. Changing names and protecting habitat are sort of out of my control, though, at least at the moment. So on that Saturday in the park, I honored this bird by quietly watching it go about its business. 🪶
George J. Wallace, “Bicknell's Thrush, its taxonomy, distribution, and life history,” Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History 41, no. 6 (1939): 211–402.
Townsend, J. M., K. P. McFarland, C. C. Rimmer, W. G. Ellison, and J. E. Goetz, “Bicknell's Thrush (Catharus bicknelli), version 1.0,” Birds of the World (2020). doi:10.2173/bow.bicthr.01.
Roger Tory Peterson, A Field Guide to the Birds (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1961), 267.
Henri Oullet, “Bicknell’s Thrush: Taxonomic Status and Distribution,” The Wilson Bulletin 105, no. 4 (1993): 545–572.
Robert Z. Dobos, “Ontario Bird Records Committee Report for 1996,” Ontario Birds 15, no. 2 (1997): 59.
David Allen Sibley, What It’s Like to Be a Bird (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2020), 131.
Fred J. Alsop III and the Smithsonian Institution, Birds of North America (New York: Covent Garden Press, 2006), 754.
Really charming bird and lovely writing. Thanks for this!