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EARTH & SPIRIT
It comes before dawn, the most plaintive, haunting music. The dark fills with the song of the wood thrush. The calm melody of this piper at the gates of morning prevails before sunrise stirs the forest.
My wife and I were recently on a visit to the little cabin we keep on my brother's farm in the Missouri Ozarks. A welcome part of these summer visits are the serenades by the wood thrush, a denizen of the nearby oaks and hickories.
I never tire of it. The bird sings a bit of its melody, then pauses, producing a tension between the brief silence and the next phrase, as if the thrush knows how achingly lovely this song is and so creates anticipation by seeming to halt in mid-melody.
There's an undercurrent of sadness and wistful yearning, one that bird and human perhaps share.
It's the same song, sung by ancestors of the bird I hear, that Thoreau, Audubon, the pilgrims fresh off Plymouth Rock and native people constructing their mound villages 20,000 years ago all heard on our continent.
Modern science now has caught up with this bird's ancient magic.
Ornithologist Crawford Greenewalt discovered while doing audio-acoustic studies that wood thrush song includes frequencies that were not multiples of...