The dawn chorus. You love it or you hate it.
If you hate it, it’s probably because you don’t appreciate being roused from sleep by a vigorous burst
of birdsong in the early morning darkness. This is a common sentiment in the parts of the world where
we now think of nature as an interruption of our experience, rather than the medium through which
it flows.
If you love the dawn chorus, it may be for its music, its regularity, its symbolism. Or just for the happy
reminder that nature survives, at least in some form, right outside the window.
I love the dawn chorus in part because it contains songs that you can hear at no other time of day. A number
of North American birds sing dawn songs unlike anything they say after sunrise. I’ve written here about several:
Violet-green Swallow, American Robin, Cassin’s Kingbird, Cordilleran and Pacific-slope
Flycatchers. But if you had asked me six months ago whether Brown Creeper had a distinctive dawn song,
I would have told you no. .....
The images below are from Wikimedia Commons:
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