You can call me Wrenny.

Carolina Wren

My name is Carolina Wren, Wrenny to my friends, of which I don’t have many. You see I am a solitary bird, except for my girlfriend. I prefer to go it alone using my long down curved sharp beak to look for juicy morsels of bugs and larvae. Granted I do spend most of my time in thick underbrushy places in the woods and really, who else would like to hang out with me? Certainly not those mixed foraging insectivores like chickadees and nuthatches and downy woodpeckers…the snobs. They spend all their time working through the forest mainly up in the trees and on the bark. Any way I’ll let it go. There is a lady who lives in the house down by the river who seems to take a big interest in me. Why just yesterday she was way up here in the woods, where it thins out a bit from all that logging they did a long time ago.  Anyway the lady was here on those two sticks that glide on the snow and she was so happy to see me drinking from a little brook amongst all the sapling yellow birches. She said out loud, “What are you still doing up here in Vermont? Don’t you know it’s winter and that you are the state bird of South Carolina?” Well, even if I am an insectivore (I just love to dig up bugs with my long curved beak) I am able to get along just fine sometimes cause there are bugs hiding under leaves and under logs and I will eat the occasional fruit or seed (yuck). Actually, even though Vermont is pretty far north for me, I will stay here all year and if it’s not too cold, I will survive. My girlfriend and I usually stay together all the time but I haven’t seen her in quite a while (I think she may be dead). I remember one time I gave that lady quite a start when I decided to hang out in her little homemade greenhouse cause it was nice and warm in there and the dirt was soft and there were all kinds of bugs and eggs to be found. Funny thing is one night I spent under her car and when she went out to go to work at some ungodly hour I flew out and frightened her good.

For you Latin scholars out there my name is Thryothorus T. ludovicianus(means from Louisianna). I am a cute little brown bird with a creamy colored belly and a white eye-stripe and I have this enduring trait of holding my tail up in the air when I feed. I sing a little song that is sort of Cardinal-like which goes like this “teakettleteakettleteakettle”, but if you come too close I can do this raspy cheecheechee which will send your blood curdling. Like most wrens, I am pretty aggressive (we’re in counseling over this). If you would like to see and hear me a little better, those folks at the Cornell lab of Ornithology do a good job.

http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/carolina_wren/lifehistory