Date: May 5, 2026

Species: Hylocichla mustelina (Wood Thrush)

Status: Displaced from the cedar glade and mixed forest.

Conditions: 75 F. Seismic vibrations from 4,000-lb hydraulic breakers on the ridge.

Here in Wilson County, if you’re lucky enough to visit Cedars of Lebanon State Park, you’ll get to see an untouched cedar glade. And you just might hear a Wood Thrush. He’s the one singing two notes at once, the song drifting through the canopy like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. You can’t miss it, a flutelike, three-part ee-oh-lay. My mother called it a one-bird chorus, harmonizing with itself.

But today, on my hilltop, high above the new development, the frequency is wrong.

I’m a self-taught, slightly curmudgeonly birder, and I am tracking a single male Hylocichla mustelina. He was pushed out of the development across the street, and now he sits in the White oak in my south pasture. He is a refugee in the most literal sense. He requires deep, damp leaf litter to forage for beetles and snails, but the dynamite has turned the ridge into a haze of limestone dust. The thrum of machinery begins at 7 AM and continues until nightfall. Today, it competes with the thrush’s song; his dual-tone frequency can’t compete with the low-decibel grind of a bulldozer. His singing rises up, colliding with the heavy metal band. But I hold still u der the tree a d listen.

Last year, I stopped clearing the brush piles. To the neighbors, it’s a mess, but I’m sure the thrush would disagree. I drag fallen hackberry branches to the habitats along the rusty wire fence. My boots make a whuffling noise as I step through the rotting leaves. Yes. I’m that neighbor, the one who let’s the pokeweed grow and refuses to dig up the wild black berry bushes. My leaves are staying under the trees. I don’t explain why (but I’ll tell you: because that’s where the snails live. If I manicure this yard, I will starve him). 

The physics of the scarred ridge have teeth. When you dynamite the rock, you don’t just change the view; you shatter the biology of the hillside, not to mention the acoustics. 

If you hear a Wood Thrush, then you’re near a healthy deciduous forest. That’s his natural habitat. He’s in my yard because it’s an edgy place—partly wild, but surrounded on 2-1/2 sides by pristine subdivisions. He’s the latest refugee from the war zone next door. I am recording his presence not because it is joyful, which it is, but because his displacement marks the extinction of an ancient woodland. 

Sometimes he perches on the fence near the orange mesh fence that protects the development from trespassers. He is a small, brown-spotted witness to an undoing of a million years history. His defiant ballad tells a story: if you put roads and swimming pools in a forest, you break the music. 

I drag another branch to the habitat. I cannot keep the bird. But I’ll keep the weeds. I’ll keep the brush. And I’ll keep the notes.