I am currently Varied Thrush rich in my urban north Everett yard. A few show up most years during the 'worst' winter weather but this year they're sticking around. Since the first snow just before Thanksgiving I've seen them every day - there are at least two females and two males about. They appreciate all the leaves I leave on the ground under the trees all winter. I've had several ground-level views out of my basement windows from just 2 ft away - binoculars not required - as they lurked beneath a sword fern. When the snow was still around the leaf litter was only exposed along the house foundation under the eaves. On one day a Varied Thrush was poking thru this limited resource when a Robin snooped up to the same spot. I think of Varied Thrushes as timid birds (and they are around people ) so was mildly suprised when the Varied put the Robin in a brief headlock and gave it a bit of a thrush thrashing. The Robin quickly departed.

Now when I go out on the back porch in the morning and dusk I hear the pleasant call of the Varied's - an abbreviated version of their breeding season song. This takes me back many moons ago when I worked several years for the park service at Mount Rainier, in the summer haunts of this species. I lived for two summers at the aptly named Paradise. Early summer in particular the fog was truly 'world class' - you could hardly see ten feet - the densest fog I've ever experienced, sometimes for days (and nights) on end, even up to a week. One felt like being in a big cold sensory deprivation tank, sensory inputs down to a minimum.

Thirty some years later what I remember most were three sounds: first the songs of the Varied Thrush, then the hooting of the (then) Blue Grouse both of which are somewhat ventriloquial on a sunny day but in the dense fog carried in an especially beautiful and mysterious way. The sound was everywhere but you'd need the sonar of an Orca to find anything. The last of the sounds that stick with me came from the Mountain herself - the roar of falling ice towers and rockfall from the nearby Nisqually Glacier. Even with the intellectual knowledge that all this deep booming and crashing was (hopefully) happening down in the glacier canyon below Paradise ridge the sound was sometimes so amplified by the fog that the idea of getting squashed by a freight train of ice and snow coming out of the fog did'nt seem out of the realm of possiblity.

So that's some of what having Varied Thrushes in my yard-by-the-Sound does for me.

Jeff Gibson, Everett Wa