June 13 was a spectacular Sunday and I decided to celebrate the occasion by heading down to an Adirondack chair positioned at the southern edge of the wet meadow behind my house. Positioned in such a way that allows me to look northward, I can see the bowl-shaped meadow and the hillside upon which my house stands. In the past few years, I have taken to calling this my “Thinking Chair” and I have spent hours and hours down there taking photographs of birds and allowing my quiet mind to wander in search of creative inspiration.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I feel compelled to admit, to my great shame, that this was my first visit to the Thinking Chair all year. A long and rainy April (we even had some late snow to contend with) and a busy month of May resulted in little opportunity to get down to this favorite spot of mine. When the only time to visit such places comes on weekends, you are at the mercy of the weather and compulsory social engagements.

As a result, you simply may not have the chance to relax outside at home.

Anyway, this visit to the edge of my meadow turned out to be utterly delightful. I have installed a small feeding platform near the Thinking Chair where I can place a handful of seeds for the little birds. Last year, I had chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches landing on my head and shoulders by the end of the summer. Would they remember me after such a long absence? Yes! In less than two minutes after my arrival, the chickadees were back.

I only ended up taking a few photos that day, but I did spend a lot of time listening to the songs of the different birds of the meadow. I was also able to hear the songs of some forest birds in the woods behind me and among those songs, I found one particular voice to be the most beautiful of all; the voice of a male wood thrush. Complex, beautiful and completely beyond the ability of any human to reproduce, the song of the wood thrush has been described as if the bird was saying, “Eeee-oh-lay!”

Creative, but it does not do justice to the sound made by the bird.

One male was quite close, so I decided to abandon the Thinking Chair and enter the forest itself along a trail that I have established. I was able to move quietly into a spot with some dense, low vegetation and it was here that the bird was singing up a storm. Thinking I might be able to provoke a response, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and played a recording of this species’ song. The response was instantaneous and energetic.

A beautiful bird with a cinnamon-colored head, a white breast covered in small black spots and wings and tail feathers the color of dark rust-brown came zooming out of the underbrush as though he had been shot out of a cannon. His song was so loud that I could easily understand why I could regularly hear him from the deck back at the house. He was all jacked up with indignant fury that any competitor would dare invade the heart of his territory that he was willing to ignore me in an effort to locate and engage the enemy. This was the perfect response and I capitalized on the opportunity with my camera.

Wood thrushes are described as Neotropical migrants, which is a group of birds that breed in North America and spend the northern winter in Central America, South America, the Caribbean and Mexico (which is technically part of North America). So, if you have that map of the Americas in your mind, you can imagine the winter range of the wood thrush by shading in parts of southern Texas and all of Central America to the southern border of Panama.

Before I started graduate school, I worked for the US Forest Service at UMass Amherst, and part of my time there was spent researching for a book on Neotropical migrants. I spent weeks in the library looking for information on the common names that different birds had in different countries and the wood thrush is one that shows the kind of name variation that can cause confusion among bird enthusiasts. In Canada, the bird is “Grive de Bois” (the wood thrush). In Mexico, the bird is “Zorzalito Maculado” (the little spotted thrush). In Guatemala, the bird is “Zorzal Maculado” (the spotted thrush) and in Costa Rica, the bird is “Zorzal del Bosque” (the forest thrush).

In all of the different countries, the species spends time in different habitats, different governments, different conditions and different concerns, but the one common denominator across the board is the fact that humans are destroying wood thrush habitat. This is of special concern in the Central American countries because the geographic area in question is so much smaller.

As a result, the wood thrush is declining across the breeding range.

However, there was an active pair of wood thrushes in my woods and that meant that, somewhere, there was a cup-shaped nest of grasses and slender plant fibers held together with mud. After building her nest, the female wood thrush will have laid four or five beautiful blue eggs (a color common among the thrushes) and would then commence with the “standard” pattern of two weeks of incubating and another two weeks of feeding nestlings. Once the chicks fledge, the male will take care of them while the female starts another nest.

So, if you are in the woods and you hear a magical sound that has been described as a bird singing “Eeee-oh-lay,” then rejoice because you are near a wood thrush. This marvelous sound echoes through the forest in the early morning and can simply melt away any feelings of stress or unhappiness, so I hope you are able to hear one. Let the little spotted thrush — or the thrush of the forest — work its magic on you and infuse you with calm and joy.

Bill Danielson has been a professional writer and nature photographer for 24 years. He has worked for the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and Massachusetts State Parks and currently teaches high school biology and physics. Visit speakingofnature.com for more information, or go to Speaking of Nature on Facebook.

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