October 10th. 2011. The Wren is how I first knew it; just the Wren – popular country lore called it Jenny Wren; Troglodytes troglodytes. Impossibly tiny brown birds, the size of a baby’s fist, with an intense, complex song like the dark and tangled brush piles they favour. Much later I discovered that the (Jenny) Wren that I grew up with is the same bird as America’s Winter Wren, also Troglodytes troglodytes.
In time I learned that wrens as a family are birds of the New World, consequently the greatest number of wren species is found in the Americas; nine species in North America and more than thirty in Mexico.
Things have changed since I was first birding. The (Jenny /Winter) Wren is a bird of perhaps many species, so Troglodytes troglodytes has been split. Not sure if you’re following this, but anyway now there’s Troglodytes pacificus, the Pacific Wren.
On a walk up an severe cleft in a B.C mountainside I heard the familiar peppery ‘tchkkk’ and with a bit of coaxing, managed to catch a glimpse of my first Pacific Wren. Just as compact, just as busy, just as confident in its tinnyness as it’s former congeners, T. troglodytes.
A new-to-me species is deservedly (though not always) bird of the day and Pacific Wren was it today. Frankly the competition was slender, a visit to a stunningly beautiful lake earlier in the day only produced 2 Red-necked Grebes, a handful of Common Loons and a female Wood Duck, while a Common Raven was calling hollowly from the other side.
Here’s one of the Red-necked Grebes.
