Winter Bird

Townsend's Solitaire
Myadestes townsendi

On January 18, 2004, John Hockema found a Townsend's solitaire in a red cedar, a common species of juniper, about ten miles from my home. Although I had looked for solitaires before, I had never found one. I hoped my luck was about to change, but my search that day was unsuccessful. The next day Craig Mandel led a field trip to Fillmore County for his Twin Cities-area Audubon Club. I met them at the solitaire place, but in spite of looking carefully and playing a recording of the bird's clear, single-note call, we were unable to find this thrush from the western states and western Canada that sometimes winters as far east as the Upper Midwest, where it maintains a solitary territory in the middle of a supply of cedar berries. Some compensation for our lack of success came with the sightings of a southern shrike and overwintering flickers and robins on the way to my woods, where the group leader found further compensation in watching a tufted titmouse at our feeders, a species that is uncommon elsewhere in Minnesota.

During breeding season, the solitaire's diet expands to include worms, spiders, and insects that it finds in coniferous mountain forests. It hunts by hovering to pick insects and berries from foliage, pouncing on prey that it finds on the ground, and flying out from a perch to catch prey in the air. Although the bird is similar to flycatchers in its slender shape, long tail, and method of catching insects, the complex, warbling songs that the male sings to defend his territory prove his membership in the thrush family.

Solitaires use pine needles, bark strips, twigs, and grass to construct a shallow cup nest in a dirt bank, in the crevice of a cliff, under tree roots, or under another overhanging shelter. Ornithologists know that the clutch size is usually three to five, that the incubation period is about eleven days, and that both parents feed their babies, which have spotted breasts like the other young thrushes, but they know little else of this bird's breeding biology. In his 1926 book Birds of Western Canada, P. A. Taverner wrote, "A bird typical of the high mountain solitudes, well named Solitaire. Its unobtrusive dull grey golor, glorious song, and the romantic habitat and names surround it with an air of mystery that piques the imagination."

I suspect that solitaires have occasionally wintered among our cedar trees in years when they have wandered east due to poor supplies of berries in their usual winter range. My inability to find one may be due to lack of luck or diligence, so I will continue to look for this bird, which my friends say is not so difficult to find, especially since the species is doing well and faces few significant threats.

Nancy Overcott, illustrations by Dana Gardner, Fifty Uncommon Birds of the Upper Midwest