Now that the trees have leaves and it’s hard to see birds in the forest, it’s time to appreciate bird songs. In late May and June, a haunting, beautiful song emanates from the wet lowland forest.

People hear this song in the early morning and again in the evening, and they wonder about this echoing, soft, flutelike song, of which the notes go down the scale as if in circles. But if people go into the forest to try to find the singer, the mosquitoes drive them away. Even if they can tolerate the mosquitoes, they can’t see the bird among the leaves.

This song has been described as “like a flute,” “like a harp,” or that the voice “veers down the drain” or “echoes down a rain barrel.” Fields Pond Audubon Center gets many phone calls from people asking, “What bird sings such a beautiful song?”

The singer is a kind of thrush that is reddish-brown on its head, back and tail and white with speckles on its breast. This thrush is called the veery.

Like the other thrushes, the veery’s song is full of harmonics that give rise to the beautiful song. Harmonics are overtones at fixed intervals, so that the notes are pleasing to the ear. All thrushes have rich tones with more than one note at the same time.

Humans have a larynx at the top of their windpipe, but thrushes and other songbirds have a syrinx at the junction of the two windpipes. Thrushes can sing one note on one side of the syrinx, and another note with the other at the same time – hence the harmonics.

Beautiful-colored birds bring visual enjoyment to people, but the thrushes take the prize for the best voice. Most 19th and early 20th century ornithologists give the hermit thrush first prize for most beautiful voice and the veery the second prize, but the veery was environmentalist Rachel Carson’s favorite bird.

For information on Fields Pond Audubon Center, call 989-2591.