Winter wren finds barn a seasonal refuge

The short days and bitter cold have put a damper on much of my birding activity for most of the season. In fact, the most bird-watching I’ve done has been from my living-room windows; luckily, that has proved to be fruitful enough to keep the creative juices flowing.

Of course there are the weekends, and temperatures have periodically moderated enough to permit a birding trip if I were so inclined. But while I’d have liked to, my first love – horses – has taken up most of the remaining daylight hours at the end of the week.

Luckily, sometimes my two loves mesh; after all, I ride at a barn nestled among the hills, surrounded by woods and containing large pastures. During spring and summer, I hear and see bobolinks in the pastures; barn swallows nest inside the barn; warblers sing within the woods; and I’ve heard barred owls and pied-billed grebes calling from a nearby marsh.

More recently I’ve seen small flocks of robins and waxwings as they picked the frozen fruit of some apple trees. Several weeks ago, though – back in January – I saw something that surprised and delighted me.

I was walking through a section of the barn used for storage. The lighting was dim, so at first I thought I was seeing things when I saw something flit rapidly through the space. The first thing I thought was European house sparrow (I can feel you fellow birders cringing in disgust out there). This adaptive, but aggressive and non-native species – introduced by people – has slowly taken over the continent. Their arrival at a location almost always signals the decline – and even local extirpation – of one of our native birds, particularly those that are cavity-nesters. I was glad they hadn’t made inroads at “my” barn.

But yet, here was this bird. It alighted on a stack of wooden beams and began hopping toward me. I realized the bird was too tiny, and its tail way too stubby, to be the dreaded house sparrow. It was a winter wren!

Its name notwithstanding, winter wrens actually do not routinely winter here in Maine, except maybe at the very southern tip of the state; some also may winter in southern New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Most of the region’s population, however, retreats to the Southeast during the cold months. We don’t notice their presence here until anywhere between March and May.

I wrote “notice their presence” rather than “see” because this bird is more often heard than seen. It’s a tiny bird that nests among the moss-covered conifers of a mature or old-growth forest. But for its size, it sure packs a wallop of a song – one of the longest, most melodious songs in birddom.

The “Birds of North America” species account, for the most part a dry, scientific collection of research on a particular bird, shares a refreshing descriptive of this song: “….the stuff of superlatives … wonderful … charming … marvelous … copious, rapid, prolonged and penetrating, having a great variety of the sweetest tones, and uttered in a rising and falling or finely undulating melody … [a] gushing melody, which seems at once expressive of the wildest joy and the tenderest sadness.”

Wow.

I wondered how this little fellow was surviving being two to four months early. Then I realized the barn was a perfect place to look for dormant insects-plenty of little nooks and crannies to house them. And, with the heat generated by the horses, perhaps warm enough to withstand the frigid temperatures at night.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen the wren since that week, but I hope he survives so that he may sing his song of “wildest joy and tenderest sadness.”

NEWS bird columnist Chris Corio can be reached at bdnsports@bangordailynews.net