UKBirds

Hermit Thrush

Catharus guttatus

The Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) is a medium-sized North American thrush. It is not very closely related to the other North American migrant species of Catharus, but rather to the Mexican Russet Nightingale-thrush.

This species is 15-17 cm in length, and has the white-dark-white underwing pattern characteristic of Catharus thrushes. Adults are mainly brown on the upperparts, with reddish tails. The underparts are white with dark spots on the breast and grey or brownish flanks. They have pink legs and a white eye ring. Birds in the east are more olive-brown on the upperparts; western birds are more grey-brown.

Their breeding habitat is coniferous or mixed woods across Canada, Alaska, and the northeastern and western United States. They make a cup nest on the ground or relatively low in a tree.

Hermit Thrushes migrate to wintering grounds in the southern United States and south to Central America but some remain in northern coastal US states and southern Ontario. Although they usually only breed in forests, Hermit Thrushes will sometimes winter in parks and wooded suburban neighbourhoods. They are very rare vagrants to western Europe. It has also occurred as a vagrant in northeast Asia.

They forage on the forest floor, also in trees or shrubs, mainly eating insects and berries.

The Hermit Thrush's song is ethereal and flute-like, consisting of a beginning note, then several descending musical phrases in a minor key, repeated at different pitches. They often sing from a high open location.

The Hermit Thrush is the state bird of Vermont.

Walt Whitman construes the Hermit Thrush as a symbol of the American voice, poetic and otherwise, in his elegy for Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," one of the fundamental texts in the American literary canon. "A Hermit Thrush" is the name of a poem by the American poet Amy Clampitt. A Hermit Thrush appears in the fifth section ("What the Thunder Said") of the T. S. Eliot poem The Waste Land.

Former Canadian indie-rock band Thrush Hermit took their name from a reversal of the two parts. It is also shared by the American bands Hermit Thrushes and Hermit Thrush.

The song of the Hermit Thrush is audible in the "Garden" stage of Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Wii.