Hermit thrush, the state bird of Vermont

How to recognize it

The hermit thrush is a small thrush, about 6 to 7.5 inches long, weighing about an ounce. Its upperparts are brown, and its reddish-brown tail, which contrasts with the duller back, is the best mark for telling it from similar thrushes. Its pale underparts are spotted dark on the throat and breast, and it usually has a clear pale eye-ring.

The song is the reason many people love it: a set of clear, flute-like phrases, each starting on a different pitch. The call is a low tuck.

How it lives

Hermit thrushes feed mostly on the ground, picking beetles, ants, caterpillars and other insects from the leaf litter, and they add many berries, such as serviceberry, elderberry and grape. The female builds a bulky open cup of moss, weeds and twigs and lays about four pale blue eggs.

The species breeds in conifer and mixed forests across Alaska, Canada, the northern United States and mountain forests, and winters farther south in woods, thickets and parks. In Vermont it uses hardwood, mixed and spruce-fir forest, often on drier ground than other thrushes, near small openings inside large blocks of forest.

Where to hear one in Vermont

Listen in Vermont’s forests at dawn and dusk from spring through summer. Vermont lies in the core of the hermit thrush’s breeding range.

A growing population

The hermit thrush is a species of least concern, and Audubon notes that its numbers appear to be holding up well. In Vermont it is ranked secure as a breeding bird. The Vermont Center for Ecostudies reports that the state’s second breeding bird atlas found it in about 10 percent more survey blocks than the first, 171 compared with 155, with the biggest gain in the Champlain Valley.

The state bird

Vermont’s statute naming the hermit thrush as state bird is recorded as dating from 1941, although the Vermont Center for Ecostudies dates the designation to 1927.