Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast

Music of the Northern Forest: Boreal Birdsong in Literature and on the Trail

J une 2, 2000. The first day of our annual retreat from western New York to Downeast Maine. Under darkening skies and an early morning drizzle, my wife and I hiked across the blueberry barrens of Petit Manan Point, a peninsula shouldering out between Dyer Bay and Pigeon Hill Bay toward open ocean. A pair of ravens wheeled in slow, silent circles over an evergreen woods beyond the barrens. Reaching the woods, the trail led us under the canopy and out of the foggy, mizzling rain. For a long, grateful moment, we stood breathing the lemony fragrance of balsam fir, a pleasure we’d sorely missed for the past twelve months. We listened for a winter wren or a white-throated sparrow to give the forest its characteristic voice. Silence. The trail moved off through the woods, dipping down into a bog where streamers of usnea lichen hung from the spindly branches of tamaracks, then rising into a rocky clearing where the showy lavender blossoms of rhodora brightened a dark woods and a dark morning. Again we stood still, listening. This time, from a thicket of rhodora and Labrador tea behind us, a hermit thrush broke the stillness: one long, flute-like tone, then a faint, fragile jumble of trills that seemed to spiral up through the canopy of spruce and fir and dissolve into the morning mist. With that song, we’d come Music of the Northern Forest Boreal Birdsong in Literature and on the Trail tereNCe d. mosher musiC oF the NortherN Forest • 29 back to the Northern Forest, the woods that Thoreau called “all mossy and moosey.”1 Subtract birdsong from such places, and we enact a boreal version of Rachel Carson’s sobering parable in the opening chapter of Silent Spring. Like her “town in the heart of America,”2 a Northern Forest without its music is a sterile, lifeless prospect. Partly to hear it, hikers take to the trails from Old Forge to Baxter State Park every summer. Searching out its meanings and evoking its beauty, American nature writers from Henry David Thoreau to Bernd Heinrich have written memorably about this annual chorus of woodland song. iN this essay, I will examine the music of the Northern Forest in the work of Thoreau and Robert Frost, the first and (in my view) still the greatest American writers to treat the topic in depth in their different genres. While concentrating on Thoreau and Frost, I will draw on a handful of other nature writers and on my own experience of birdsong in the forests of northern New York and New England. My thesis is that, both in literature and in direct outdoor experience, the music of birds does four things: First, it quickens the Northern Forest, calls it to spring and summer life. Second, it gives particular communities within the boreal forest a voice. Third, it distills the essence of northern wilderness. And fourth, it locates those who attend to it on the border between the human and the natural worlds, where it is good for us to live. A disclaimer is called for here. Each of the four functions above is also served by other woodland creatures and by events other than birdsong . To a winter-weary eye and heart, the blossoming of the first spring beauties quickens the Northern Forest as surely as the first April song of a hermit thrush does. But neither the wildflowers nor the thrush song should be missed, and neither can be spared. Both have spoken deeply to American nature writers, and both cut close to the forest’s heart. Calling the Forest to Life Approaching the side of a wood on which were some pines, this afternoon , I heard the note of the pine warbler, calling the pines to life, though I did not see it.3 At first blush, the pine warbler seems unqualified for the job of quickening an evergreen forest in the spring. With a slow and deliberate style 30 • eNCouNters of foraging, retiring habits, and obscure streaking on a breast that is sometimes bright yellow but often dull and greenish, the bird makes a pleasant but soft-edged impression. Its musical trill, which reminds me of the gentle flow of water over smooth stones, is lovely, but easily overlooked . The bird and its music are a far cry from the fiery plumage and arresting songs of a scarlet tanager or Baltimore oriole...