#2949 "Wood Thrush Love Songs"

#2949 "Wood Thrush Love Songs"  
16 X 20 inches by 3/4 profile in depth.
Started at 9:30 am Friday, May 30th, 2025

My friend John Verburg started finding all kinds of singing birds to inspire me. What could be more positive? The world certainly needs more birds and their melodies. This wood thrush was putting everything into his song. 

The portrait went well from the first brush strokes on the eye and beak. The Thrush was positioned on the canvas so the song emerged from the upper right intersection of the thirds. The bird was singing in a colourful Cucumber Tree  (Magnolia acuminate), which is the only native magnolia species in Ontario.

The Wood Thrush is one of the first songsters to be heard in the morning and among the last in the evening. The male sings his haunting "ee-oh-lay" song from an exposed perch in the midstory or lower canopy. He uses the song to establish a territory that averages a few acres. 

Within days, a female initiates pairing by enticing him to chase her in silent circular low-level flights only feet above the ground. The prospective mates share a perch between flights. After pairing, the female helps defend the territory from intruders. Low-level threat gestures like breast puffing, crest raising, and wing and tail flicking are usually enough. They give a distinctive, sharp machine-gun-like sound as an alarm call. 

Wood Thrushes forage by hopping through leaf litter on the forest floor, tossing leaves to expose insects or probing for litter-dwelling prey. While foraging, they frequently bob upright for a look around. Foraging is largely solitary, though they may form mixed flocks on their wintering grounds, where they sometimes cautiously feed at the periphery of an army ant swarm. Pairs are socially monogamous, though extra-pair copulations are common. New pairs form each year.

The wood thrush lives in mature deciduous and mixed (conifer-deciduous) forests. They seek moist stands of trees with well-developed undergrowth and tall trees for singing perches. They prefer large forests, but will also use smaller stands of trees. The Singleton forest is perfect for them. 

They build their nests in living saplings, trees or shrubs, usually in sugar maple or American beech.

The wood thrush is a medium-sized songbird slightly smaller than the American robin but similar in shape. Males and females have a similar appearance. Young birds look similar to adults, but have tawny streaks and spots on the back, neck, and wings. 

The wood thrush flies south to Mexico and Central America for the winter. Twice a year, Wood Thrushes cross the Gulf of Mexico in a single night’s flight. The north-bound spring route is further west, along the Mississippi Valley. Males arrive on breeding grounds several days before females. The fall route heading southward follows the Atlantic coast.

Quick facts

• The wood thrush may nest and raise young two and occasionally even three times in the course of a single season.
• The wood thrush has a loud, flute-clear “ee-oh-lay” song. For the last of the three sounds, this bird sings pairs of notes simultaneously, one from each branch of its Y-shaped voice box.
• While many male songbirds answer a neighbour’s song with the same song, the male wood thrush will almost always answer a rival’s song with a different one.
• The brown-headed cowbird sometimes lays its eggs in the nests of wood thrushes, which then raise the young cowbirds. Brown-headed cowbirds lay eggs in the nests of more than 220 species of birds.

Major threats to the Wood Thrush are:

• loss or breaking up of the bird’s forest habitat resulting from urban, suburban and cottage development
• over-browsing by white-tailed deer in some locations decreases the number and type of plants and trees in the forest, including the number of saplings, where the wood thrush nests
• parasitic behaviour from brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in the nests of the wood thrush (and other birds), and whose young are fed by the host thrush at the expense of their own young
• loss and the breaking up of forests in the bird’s winter habitat 

"Special Concern" means the species lives in the wild in Ontario and is not endangered or threatened, but may become threatened or endangered. Special concern species do not receive any species or habitat protection. Shame. 

For this and much more art, click on Pixels or go straight to the Collections. Here is the new Wet Paint 2024 Collection. 

Warmest regards and keep your paddle in the water,

Phil Chadwick