As predicted, the song thrush, after its long silence, returned to serenade the district about 10 days ago. It was singing in the dark around seven o'clock in the morning. And, yes, it is really singing, not just making early-day noises. Lewis Thomas, quoted in Richard Mabey's Oxford Book of Nature Writing, affirms that behind all the "glossaries of warning calls, alarms, mating messages, pronouncements of territory, calls for recruitment and demands for dispersal, there is a redundant, elegant sound that is unaccountable as part of the working day". And of the thrush in his own backyard, he writes that he "sings down his nose in meditative, liquid runs of melody over and over again, and I have the strongest impression that he does this for his own pleasure. Some of the time he seems to be practising like a virtuoso in his apartment. He starts a run, reaches a midpoint in the second bar where there should be a set of complex harmonics, stops, and goes back to begin over again, dissatisfied. Sometimes he changes his notation so conspicuously that he seems to be improvising sets of variations. It is a meditative, questioning kind of music, and I cannot believe that he is simply saying `thrush here'". The writer goes on to include the robin, the meadow lark, the nightingale, the chaffinch and their various approaches, and rounds it off: "The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there ever having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology."
Thoreau, writing in 1852 of what he calls the wood thrush grows even more ecstatic. "Whenever a man hears it, he is young, and Nature is in her spring... this bird never fails to speak to me out of an ether purer than I breathe, of immortal beauty and vigour. He deepens the significance of all things seen in the light of his strain. He sings to make men take higher and truer views of things. He sings to amend their institution, to relieve the slave on the plantation and the prisoner in his dungeon, the slave in the house of luxury and the prisoner in his own low thoughts." The song thrush is as widely distributed throughout the country as the blackbird, but is less numerous; only about 390,000 pairs to the blackbird's two million pairs. Less conspicuous, says Cabot, and "a more skulking feeder". But sing, he does. It is music. Y